t’s no small feat getting to the third movie in a series and still managing to create something remotely watchable. More remarkable still – unprecedented, really – is that while the latest installment of the espionage series may not be the best in the trilogy of international espionage thrillers about assassin Jason Bourne’s search for his identity, it is nonetheless a spectacular windup toy of a thriller.

Published in 1990 and the last of the Bourne thrillers to be written by Ludlum himself, The Bourne Ultimatum picks up immediately after 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, wherein our amnesiac hero had taken out the man responsible for turning him into a mindless killing machine and ending up on the road to his true identity.

The identity crisis that agonized him in The Bourne Identity has now shifted into more interesting territory. This time around we have Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), the rogue CIA spook with the memory of a goldfish. He knows who he is now (since CIA agent Pamela Landy told him at the end of The Bourne Supremacy) and who killed his girlfriend, but he remains tormented by the question of how he became this government-trained killing machine. Did he go on his own, or was he pushed into it?

Nonetheless, scores of cops, federal officers and Interpol agents would prefer him dead. So he struggles to reconstruct his identity while simultaneously bringing down wild conspiracies percolating among the higher-ups in the American intelligence community. All the while, he has made the top of the CIA’s most-wanted list, and even just the sight of a meter maid is enough to send him into fits of paranoia.