In 2002, The Bourne Identity drew a large part of its pop and verve from the attached-at-the-hip nature of its conceit and action — as Matt Damon’s overwhelmed, memory-impaired CIA operative Jason Bourne experienced the action in bewildering fashion, so too did the film’s audience. With elements of his personal identity uncovered, the sequels have each in their own way extended Bourne’s search for professional closure. To his former employers, however, Bourne is the loosest of loose ends, and so they’re still looking to tie him off.

The Bourne Ultimatum, then, serves as an involving and fitting bookend to Damon’s character-powered spy thriller series, paying off in a thrilling manner his amnesiac assassin’s search to uncover the roots of his identity while also delivering plenty of slam-bang, real-world action set across a sprawling variety of locations. The film opens at a dead sprint, and doesn’t much slow down; even its quiet, contemplative moments have a sense of unease and their own careening forward momentum.

Anchoring the movie in resolute fashion, Damon delivers another intense performance, absorbing information at a high rate of speed and translating that into both rapid analysis and breathless deed. The combination of massive raw intelligence and swallowed grief and self-torture that inform Bourne is captured as much in Damon’s clenched jaw and hard-set eyes as any dialogue (after all, who is left for Bourne to really open up to?), and he feels every bit the chariot driver here.

The film’s narrative proper is very contemporary in its subject matter — a covert intelligence program targeting, and in some cases eliminating, American citizens — but returning director Paul Greengrass (United 93) keeps the focus quite tightly personal. He does this by staging large swathes of The Bourne Ultimatum in crowded public places, settings where Bourne is palpably uncomfortable, and forced to constantly react and improvise.

As always, too, Greengrass trades in small details that mightily inform character, and thus help elevate The Bourne Ultimatum above and beyond its genre roots. In a game of high-stakes cat-and-mouse at a packed Waterloo Station in London, a single quick glance conveys that Bourne knows the angle of a gunshot that has felled a bystander; later, after a ferocious close-range action sequence, the director indulges Bourne a moment of quiet, broken shame over the fact that he’s been forced to kill again. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 111 minutes)