It’s fair to say that Bourne single-handedly made spy movies great again. The first two films were a breath of fresh air to a genre that had seen its hay day in the seventies and had since became stale and stupid, dominated by the increasingly absurd Bond series and by lackluster thrillers. In The Bourne Identity, and more so in its sequel, spying was a dirty, nasty business perpetrated by bad people, and what separated Bourne wasn’t that he could get the girls or how he drank his martini, but the fact that he could kill you with a rolled-up newspaper in two seconds flat.

Thankfully, with such a lot to live up to, The Bourne Ultimatum doesn’t disappoint. In fact, in places it comes close to thriller perfection – frustratingly so, because many of its few faults are ones that were evident in Supremacy too, and should have been put to rest there. Most of it, again, comes down to the certification; Ultimatum feels like a film geared entirely toward a mature audience, not particularly because it’s violent (although it is), but because it’s dark in tone and fundamentally brutal. But it’s also peculiarly bloodless, and as with Supremacy, Greengrass generally achieves this by wobbling the camera like mad whenever there’s anything that might upset the kiddies happening on screen. Another great fight scene is rendered almost incomprehensible because, filmed in shake-o-vision, it’s like watching two men wrestling on a dingy in a hurricane. An excellent car chase suffers the same fate, with some dizzying editing and close-ups of Matt Damon’s foot thrown in as if to deliberately confuse. Both are great sequences, well choreographed enough to survive the abuse, even, but they could have been better and it seems absurd that a movie very clearly not aimed at a young teenage audience should be so castrated.

The realism is a definite virtue of the series, and Greengrass’s documentary style direction, even with the sometimes nausea-inducing camerawork, clearly contributes to that realism. Thankfully, for every moment where it’s distracting there are others when it works and you’re entirely drawn in. The best such sequence sees Bourne trying to contact a reporter who’s uncovered some useful information, whilst simultaneously trying to keep both himself and his contact out of the hands of the bad guys. While there are elements of action in there, they’re so abrupt that you barely notice. The real thrill is in the battle of wits, in Bourne’s clinical proficiency, and it’s very different from the average thriller set piece. In fact the Bourne series arguably has its spiritual heritage in heist and con movies, films like The Sting where the fun is in watching supremely skilled people pull off misdeeds with dazzling panache. Damon now totally inhabits the part, and is magnetic to watch, not because he’s likeable or attractive but because you never know what the hell he’ll do next, except that it will be cool and faintly terrifying.

The Bourne Ultimatum, though it shares the niggling faults of its predecessors, is also just as good – perhaps even marginally better – and satisfyingly rounds off an excellent trilogy. One word of warning, though – if you haven’t seen The Bourne Supremacy, or even if you haven’t seen it recently, you’ll probably be a bit lost. In some ways, it’s more Bourne 2.5 than part three – it ties into Supremacy in some very neat ways, including one particular sequence that’s repeated in a completely different light. It even has the same closing song over a credits sequence that pays homage to its own predecessor. But on the whole, that should be seen as a reason to watch Supremacy again on DVD rather than to avoid Ultimatum in the cinema – apart they’re both great films, but taken together they form the best spy thriller of recent years.