“The Bourne Ultimatum” is an absorbingly entertaining capstone to one of the more surprising film franchises in recent memory. Better than last decade’s major cycle, the thrillers based on Tom Clancy’s airport novels, the Bourne films patch together an interesting character study coated with at least a patina of relevance to modern espionage. Directors Doug Lyman (the first) and Paul Greengrass (the second and third) have lifted the spy genre out of the Cold War era while retaining its action-film DNA, unlike other recent spy films like “Syriana” and “The Constant Gardener” which, though good movies in their own right, let highbrow ambition get in the way of scratching the cloak-and-dagger itch the way the Bond movies did. Besides, no one will ever top the explanation of how the world secretly operates in Chayefksy’s memorable board room speech in “Network”, so why not relax and enjoy some femme fatales and knockabout car chases?

In this chapter, ostensibly the last, super CIA assassin Jason Bourne continues his pursuit of his most elusive quarry, himself. Matt Damon will never be cast better than he was here as the blue-eyed All-American type weaponized into a robotic hit man for Uncle Sam. Damon knows how to pick roles in which his looks work well for him. As they did in his breakthrough “Good Will Hunting” and recently in “The Departed”, Damon’s deceptively changeable face is like one of those visual puzzles in which first a set of up arrows is visible but when the negative space is seen the picture is suddenly reversed into a set of down arrows. With his chiseled jawline, ice blue eyes, snubbed nose, and  schoolboy haircut, Damon can be both the golden Harvard boy and the Southie dock worker, the homecoming king and the poolhall thug, all in the same role. His shifty looks fit when the mystery of Bourne’s identity is unraveled. The distinction between loyal soldier and exploited assassin becomes a matter of perspective—in what light we view his actions and those of the people who give the orders. As tough and well-meaning as these warriors are, the moral wall separating them from monsters is a fragile one.

A subtle point in a film that more than many others of its kind brings home to the viewer the intense flesh-and-blood physicality of its characters. In the Bourne films every punch matters, every fight takes its toll. James Bond would have been in the sack with his latest nympho conquest right about the time Bourne is jabbing himself with a painkiller shot in a dingy Russian pharmacy. The centerpiece of ‘Ultimatum’ is a fistfight between Bourne and Desh, a rival assassin from Tangier, an exquisitely exciting bout of whiplash fighting styles that ends anticlimacticly with a slow, silent chokehold. The best shot is the last, when the camera watches Damon standing over his victim, catching his breath. On Damon’s chin is a big drop of sweat, gleaming like a limpid drop of honey in the African sun baking through the bathroom window. Greengrass has already done a good job of putting the men’s exertion onscreen in a flinch-inducingly visceral way, but that bead of sweat is a welcome detail sorely missing from other action films. These bodies have vulnerability. Nearly every scene in the movie has a similar detail that exposes this frailty. The best are Bourne stealing garments off of clotheslines to wrap his hands in so he can grip a ledge jagged with broken glass, or later on Bourne grabbing the seatbelt straps when he knows the car he’s in is about to take a nasty spill. The cumulative impression they leave is one of a smarter, tougher, more exciting breed of action movie.

Disappointingly, “The Bourne Ultimatum”, like its predecessors, still hasn’t gotten the espionage right. The same rot spoken by government agents in other films has seeped into this one. Never was the joke about “central casting” so applicable as it is here; any of the G-men in this movie could have come from the cartoonish Pentagon of “Transformers”. As intelligent as ‘Ultimatum’ seems, the smarts mostly come from the sleight-of-hand in Greengrass’s staging of action sequences and in Damon’s disciplined acting. When talk turns to spy matters, it’s wincing time. CIA chiefs, all milquetoast white men, portentously address their underlings as “people”: “People, let’s get on this”, or “People, this is security alert level five-alpha-bravo—move!” Twentysomething mallrats in headseats looking at “the grid” on iMacs are once again outwitted by a character who pays in cash and uses public phones. The government consists of beleagured heroes from Frank Capra movies arguing in hallways with emboldened villains from Oliver Stone movies. And the “plot” is a line of logical knots untied with barely a whisper of effort. A key break in Bourne’s quest comes in the form of a New York address taken from a snippet of CIA letterhead that survives a fire. Now, CIA letterhead does exist but it must be doubted that it would contain the address to a top-secret brainwashing program, and anyway wouldn’t Bourne have assumed the orders were coming from the home office long before seeing the stationery? This has to be the silliest plot turn foisted on an audience in a long, long time. Or perhaps it’s the wittiest: for all our high tech superiority, the best espionage is still searching garbage.

The film is good enough that you want to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter. Everything is put together with maximum skill and concern for getting the details right. Greengrass, like Alfonso Cuaron or Steven Soderbergh, appears to relish the opportunity of adding personal touches to otherwise commercial Hollywood popcorn movies. Politically the movie has its heart in the right place. Bourne’s final words, spoken to a fellow assassin—“Look at us. Look at what they make you give”—are both poetically apposite to the character and a trenchantly simple argument against the war crimes soldiers are asked to commit on behalf of cowardly bureaucrats.

The mention of “renditions” and water-boarding is no accident, either. Greengrass is trying to speak to current events. On the other hand, the film buttresses one of the more dangerous and misleading myths about war, namely that wars can be either honorable or dishonorable. Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima couplet said it differently: wars are abstract, and on the ground there is no honor or dishonor, only frightened men fighting side by side to survive. Greengrass’s film is courageous in its moral stance against torture and lawless killing, but it still wraps the core of the matter in pointless semantics. In truth there are only two kinds of war: the kind in which inhuman cruelty serves our side and the kind in which inhuman cruelty serves their side. Thinking otherwise will never put an end to wars or to the suffering of the men who fight them.