The Bourne Ultimatum (12A)

"Something happened to me," says Jason Bourne, amnesiac fugitive from the CIA. "I need to know what it was." So the hunt for his fragmented identity continues into a third movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, and it must be said that he and director Paul Greengrass have richly earned the extension.

The Bourne movies are the action- thriller success story of the 21st century, their bleak, fast-paced, pared-down style so authoritative that even the Bond franchise took note and made a darker, more realistic version of Casino Royale, with Daniel Craig as a Bourne-again tough-nut 007.

Bond, however, will always be dragging his history behind him, no matter how artful the makeover. Bourne, conversely, is still very much the man from nowhere, a ruthless assassin who might have remained a pseudonymous blank had not something drastically messed up his mental hardwiring. In this regard, he is played to eerie perfection by Matt Damon, his unemphatic handsomeness and dark, characterless duds being just the thing to help him disappear into a crowd and elude yet again the sinister eyes of surveillance.

The glance over his shoulder has become his signature reflex. This third movie almost overplays that gift for evasion; there is an early sequence on the crowded concourse at Waterloo station where Bourne has to protect an investigative reporter (Paddy Considine) from being collared by the CIA, and by some miraculous instinct he knows exactly when to duck, which bus to use as a decoy, what door will be conveniently unlocked. It's unbelievable, but also tremendously tense and exciting to watch.

London, by the way, is about the fourth stop on the movie's nervously quick itinerary, following Moscow, Langley and Paris. He's still clocking up those air miles, with Madrid, Tangiers and Manhattan still to come. Bourne, superagent that he is, always knows the native tongue and which streets are the best (ie most picturesquely crowded) to razz down on your stolen motorcycle. Actually, if the spy thing doesn't work out for him he could always launch a series of international city guides – maybe call it Bourne Traveller: The Best Places To Eat While On the Run.

This really is a man who can think on his feet. In another of those terrific chase scenes – Greengrass has made himself a master of the genre – Bourne is being pursued by police over the rooftops of Tangiers, and running full-tilt he grabs bits of laundry from the neighbourhood washing lines as he goes. Why? Well, he needs them as protective padding for his hands when he vaults over a ledge spiked with shards of glass. Brilliant – but how could he have known that glass was coming up? Just add clairvoyance to his arsenal of gifts.

The Tangiers episode finds him playing gallant bodyguard to another CIA agent (Julia Stiles), who's been with the series from the start. Also making a return is Joan Allen as a CIA bigwig sympathetic to Bourne's travails. These women are the exception, however, since the agency is harbouring a number of duplicitous creeps who are trying to conceal the Manchurian Candidate-style brainwashing that screwed up our hero in the first place.

Foremost among them is David Strathairn, wearing hawkish, steel-framed spectacles that make perhaps subliminal reference to Donald Rumsfeld. There is a persistent idea throughout the series that those in authority are pursuing a corrupt agenda, and getting away with it. When Allen confronts Strathairn over his murderous methods and asks where such killing will end, he replies: "It ends when we've won." Talk of "experimental interrogation" and glancing flashbacks to Bourne's sack-over-the-head torture will surely raise the unwelcome ghost of Abu Ghraib.

Greengrass incorporates the political resonances within the framework of a slick manhunt movie. Everything about it is streamlined, brisk and tight, and the script by Tony Gilroy, Scott Burns and George Nolfi ensures that any surplus fat is ruthlessly trimmed. Bourne measures out his words meanly, and has refined his technique of waiting a couple of extra beats before saying them. The editing falls in step with the visceral, jumpy camerawork that Greengrass has used so exhilaratingly in Bloody Sunday and the heartstopping United 93.

I have a feeling that the movie will linger in the memory for those breakneck chase scenes, each outdoing the one before in intensity; the climactic one on the streets of Manhattan is a white-knuckle ride to rival Gene Hackman's in The French Connection and William Petersen's epic "wrong way" chase in To Live and Die in LA.

Needless to say, Bourne walks away from the traumatic crash with barely a scratch on him, just as he did from the car bomb in Tangiers. Is it the illusion of his invincibility that makes him so attractive to audiences? He is always one, sometimes two, very occasionally three steps ahead of his pursuers, a potent resource which in another action hero might be dull, but in him feels like intuitive genius. And the deadly serious manner in which he operates is somehow more reassuring than the winsome punchlining of a Bond.

Perhaps in Bourne's predicament there lies a lesson for us: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Like him, we may feel we are constantly being lied to. Unlike him, most of us won't try to cross a street by hurling ourselves from a balcony through the window opposite. It looks great, but I don't think the neighbours will appreciate it.

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