An A-list cast of character actors, the great director Paul Greengrass, who took time off from spying to make "United 93," and editor Christopher Rouse have conjured up the action film of the summer.

"Ultimatum" picks up the story in Moscow, where Bourne escapes the clutches of the last Treadstone operatives after turning the tables on their leader (Brian Cox). With Cox's character and (in the first Bourne movie) Chris Cooper's original "control" dead, Pamela Landy, the CIA section chief on his case (Joan Allen), has figured out that the survival move on her part is to not want Bourne dead. She's sympathetic and wants to bring him in.

But the vast right-wing conspiracy in charge (Scott Glenn heads the CIA, David Strathairn is his new covert killing kingpin) still want the "rogue agent" silenced.

That's because bits of Bourne's story are reaching the vigilant British press, in the person of a reporter (Paddy Considine) who is on to Treadstone's successor codename, Blackbriar. The ability to monitor international cell-phone traffic means the spies are onto the reporter. And Bourne, reading his story in print, is on to him, too. Who will get to the guy first?

A car chase in New York, a motorcycle and foot race in the glorious housing clutter of Tangier, a nervy get-away in London's Waterloo Station and a hand-to-hand struggle to the death with an assassin all add up to a movie that rarely takes a breather for character. The few slow moments seem trite, by comparison. A visit to the brother of the dead girlfriend, Stiles' stone-faced flirtation, all unmoving. Strathairn and Allen bicker in front of subordinates like an old married couple, complete with CIA acronyms and spy-craft jargon.

All the while, their smart bomb who has wandered off-target is recovering memories and questioning the morality of all this following orders, all this violence.

The "Bourne" movies rarely waste a moment showing how Bourne gets from place to place, with a new passport, money, a new gun and a plan. He just does.

The way Greengrass, Damon, cinematographer Oliver Wood, editor Rouse and composer John Powell package these movies' chases should be in film-school textbooks: Shoot the hurried Damon with a hand-held camera, fairly tight so that it jostles and jumps as he stride-sprints. Cut to extreme close-ups of Bourne, a villains' neck, a gun being assembled, the door of a Ford Expedition, a locale, all in a seizure-inducing blur. Add a pulsing, Hitchcockian score, and every "Bourne" rushes past in a flurry of images, impressions of people, places, incidents, all creating a feeling that time is running out.

Which it is. But this conclusion to Bourne's odyssey assures us that while his trilogy may be over, spy movies will never be the same. "Bourne," ultimately, has reinvented them.