Tague and I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum (Maynard did not come with us as he’d already seen it and had basketball or something).

I like the Bourne movies. As I said to Tague, it pleases me that the car wrecks are very . . . “car-wrecky”. They smash up; they don’t explode. They behave like real cars: the ones made of tin foil crumple almost instantly, but the workhorses (Crown Vic cop cars, for instance) take a beating and keep ticking. I love that.

I love that the cops are not incompetent drones. They respond, they respond quickly, and they respond smartly. The writers know that, no matter how fast Bourne can run, he can’t outrun the radio.

There isn’t much value in me discussing “spoiler” stuff (but there’s a cut below). It’s a Bourne film, so I’m not even going to go into it; it is exactly what it says on the tin. Crazy good chase scenes, frenetic fist fights, documentary-style cinematography that brings you into the scene, oh-so-clever instances of Bourne outwitting people.

It works, and it works well. I think it’s a solid ending to the series, and several scenes serve as well-done bookends with the first film, both thematically and visually.

This is a movie about choices. The choices that good people make and the choices that bad people make, and the choices that Bourne makes – both the ones he’s aware of and the ones he isn’t (this makes sense in context). Choices and consequences.

There were a couple minor bits where someone said something stupid about computer security (“So and so hacked our protocols!” – when did the word protocol become synonymous with firewall?).

Otherwise my only issue has to do with the timeframe of the film, which actually takes place during the very end of the second film. It starts in Moscow, with him ducking the cops after talking to Nesky’s daughter, and at the towards the end we have the scene where he calls Pamela Landy and she tells him his real name.

This was a “six weeks later” thing in the second movie. It closed on his conversation with Nesky’s daughter, fade to black, “Six weeks later…” and he calls Landy.

I can see Blackbriar being brought up to speed – that appears to have started almost immediately after the close of the first film, so we’re talking about 3 1/2 years. But Nicky got assigned to Spain pretty quickly.

In other news, both Smoke on the Water and Cat Scratch Fever are like, the easiest songs to play on the guitar, ever.