Shot with a handheld camera, filled with off-center frames and abrupt zooms, The Bourne Ultimatum is the ne plus ultra of action disorientation. Again, the nominal goal is realism. Director Paul Greengrass, who got his start in TV documentaries, takes to a hyperstylized extreme the darting, spontaneous language of cinema vérité. While this staccato style ups the adrenaline level, the casualty is spatial coherence.

If the fight scenes in Raging Bull were expressionist, an emanation of the hero's psyche, this fight scene between Matt Damon's Bourne and a hired assassin might be termed impressionistic. The flurry of mismatched cuts presents only snatches of the action; the percussive soundtrack does as much of the storytelling as the visuals. The result, if you're watching closely, is a strange tension between the ideals of immersion and authenticity (this is how a fight feels—it's too fast to apprehend) and the obvious fakery of a technique that could hardly be more conspicuous (this has been shot and edited within an inch of its life).

Most critics found the Bourne strategy effective, but there were dissenters. The scholar David Bordwell wrote several brilliant close analyses of the Bourne films, breaking down the "run-and-gun style" to its constituent parts, and the critic Michael Atkinson complained that Ultimatum offered merely "a simulacrum of cinematic excitement."