The Bourne Ultimatum (12A)

The phrase "blink and you'll miss it" comes into its own in The Bourne Ultimatum. I looked down for a second to scribble a note during the opening sequence, and Matt Damon, who'd been on a walkway a moment before, was suddenly on a train. I scribbled again, and he was rifling through a chemist's shop. Director Paul Greengrass takes the notion of quickfire action to the extreme, and you'll just have to keep up.

It's usually an article of faith with critics that high-speed cutting, and the kind of cinema that thrives on it, doesn't let the viewer's mind function, just bludgeons it into a stupor. Maybe, when you have someone like Michael Bay at the helm, but in The Bourne Ultimatum, Greengrass, following his Bourne Supremacy in 2004, contrives a hyper-charged rhythm that actually prods your mind into a state of thrilled alertness.

In fact speed, and speed of perception, are the real subject of this intelligent, furiously kinetic film. In this third part of the Bourne trilogy, confused super-assassin Jason Bourne (Damon) is still investigating his past, trying to find out who did what to him and why. He eventually solves the riddle, but frankly, the answer is neither here nor there. Far more interesting is the sheer pace of his quest, which hops locations – Moscow, Turin, Paris, New York – as blithely and breathlessly as Bourne leaps rooftops in the frenetic Tangiers chase sequence.

While Bourne globetrots, CIA covert-ops boss Noah Vosen (David Strathairn at his most saturnine) is monitoring his every movement on screen in New York. It's here that Greengrass brings to bear his form as a current-affairs docu-drama film-maker (Omagh, Bloody Sunday, United 93), in a hard core of political-paranoia fiction. The underlying theme is a vision of total state surveillance and control: Vosen heads a programme that will allow the CIA to do whatever it sees fit, including summary execution of any of his own employees who rub him up the wrong way (Julia Stiles only gets away in one piece by committing herself to wearing her hair in a black bob for the duration). Joan Allen, as a CIA exec with a conscience, asks Vosen: "You've started down the path. When does it end?" He replies: "It ends when we've won" – an answer that somehow catches the absolutist tenor of Bush-era politics.

If you believe the film's nightmare of universal surveillance, the CIA has direct access to every CCTV camera in Waterloo Station. Waterloo, Vosen complains, is a surveillance nightmare because it's the busiest terminal in London. It certainly has an unusually heavy traffic in CIA goons and concealed snipers, something to give you pause when you board the 18.33 to Woking. Bourne guides a Guardian investigative reporter (an understandably twitchy Paddy Considine) around the station, dodging spycams and hitmen alike. It's a fantastic sequence, evoking an intense life-or-death drama happening almost unnoticed amid the station's normal bustle; indeed, Greengrass appears to have shot the sequence among Waterloo's rush-hour crowds.

Implied in this anxious fantasy of total visibility is the idea of total immediacy: someone leaves a hotel room in Tangiers, and instantly someone in New York barks: "He's on the move." The discrepancy between Bourne racing for survival on the street and technicians directing the action at computer screens is the same play on real-vs-virtual that routinely fuels today's paranoid thrillers – 24, Enemy of the State, Die Hard 4.0 – and what is this theme, after all, but a variation on the classical trope of mortals being controlled by gods (and sometimes outwitting them)?

This immediacy, though, makes for a different kind of action in The Bourne Ultimatum: the factors of distance and suspense that are traditionally indispensable in thrillers are replaced by the idea of the microscopic glitch, the nanosecond's delay that will allow Bourne to slip the net.

At one point, Considine wonders about the Bourne mystery: "What connects the dots?". And in a sense, dots – lightning-quick shots, staccato jabs of information – is what the film is made of. Greengrass is aiming for a pointilliste action-movie style, in which there are no moments wasted, no redundancies. Christopher Rouse's furious cut-and-thrust editing and Oliver Wood's nervy, hand-held photography – not so much shaky-cam as twitchy-cam – turn the film into a mechanism for abolishing time. There's barely a breather until one hour 15 minutes in, when Bourne very briefly stops, in a hotel room, to ponder his next move.

This very classy film also gives itself a feel of keen intelligence, by casting the smart likes of Strathairn, Allen and Stiles, who don't usually sign up for hyperventilating nonsense. Damon, meanwhile, is a beefy blank, which is just what's required: his Bourne is quite simply a moving target, a body in motion.

But the acting is secondary to the action, which is dazzling. There's a breakneck chase through the Tangiers medina, and quite possibly the most in-your-face car pile-up ever filmed: Greengrass doesn't believe in standing back when he can get his camera right into the fray. Casino Royale won critical kudos last year, but for realistic thrills and spills, The Bourne Ultimatum is way, way ahead of it. At one point, a frustrated Vosen says: "Decisions made in real time are never perfect." But Greengrass somehow manages to persuade us that he is working in the urgency of real time, and getting those decisions dead right.

Need to know

Paul Greengrass started his film-making career with a Super-8 camera found in the art room of his Kent secondary school. Born in 1955, in Surrey, he is known for his signature use of hand-held cameras. For 10 years he worked on 'World in Action'. In 2004, he directed 'The Bourne Supremacy'. 'United 93' (2006), his reconstruction of the hijacking of the fourth 9/11 plane, earned two Oscar nominations, one for best director. Next up is an adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 'Imperial Life in the Emerald City', a book about the world inside Baghdad's Green Zone at the start of the Iraq war.

Further watching 'The Manchurian Candidate' (John Frankenheimer, 1962, MGM DVD)

This week Jonathan Romney has been watching Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins perform Rise Up With Fists on YouTube. He has also been reading Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk: 'Since W G Sebald, it's become perfectly permissible for grown-ups to open books and only look at the pictures'