Never underestimate Jason Bourne -- the contract killer or the film franchise. "The Bourne Ultimatum" may be the third Hollywood helping of Matt Damon as the amnesiac assassin on the run, but it's as dizzying as its predecessors with car chases to die or Dramamine for.

	Jasin Boland Matt Damon tears through "The Bourne Ultimatum," the third installment of the spy series. Click photo for larger image. 'The Bourne Ultimatium' Starring: Matt Damon, Joan Allen, David Strathairn. Director: Paul Greengrass. Rating: PG-13 for violence and intense sequences of action. Web site: thebourneultimatum.com Related Story Family Film Guide

"This is Jason Bourne. You are nine hours behind the toughest target you've ever tracked," CIA spy hunter Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) cautions the black-ops who are using every weapon -- legal and illegal -- at their disposal to find and eliminate Bourne or anyone in his path.

Nothing is off-limits: e-mail, phone calls, private conversations and residences, newspaper offices, reporter's notes and jam-packed public places where security cameras can be co-opted with a couple of keystrokes. Cell phones are made for eavesdropping and transmitting photos of targets to be eliminated, and technology has never seemed so far-reaching or frightening.

When Landy senses that another CIA chief, Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), is a lethal loose cannon, he quietly chastises her, "Don't second-guess an operation from an armchair."

But if you second-guess the "Bourne" franchise, you'll find that it's holding up well since its 2002 introduction to moviegoers and 2004 continuation, particularly under the direction of Paul Greengrass ("United 93").

He sets a kinetic pace, moves the action around the globe as if a master chess player and employs camera angles that emphasize the clandestine nature of the subject matter. We often see a character over another's shoulder, as if we were secretly listening in, too.

Greengrass stages chase scenes that send Damon and others sprinting along and across roofs, breathlessly detouring through strangers' apartments and zig-zagging through traffic-choked streets. If your pulse isn't racing, the John Powell music will goose you until it does.

As "Ultimatum" opens, Damon's Bourne is in Moscow, experiencing flashbacks returning in sickening waves. Six weeks later, a dogged London reporter named Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) is researching a newspaper story that will be headlined, "Who is Jason Bourne?"

When Bourne contacts Ross, he triggers a series of escalating chases that will allow him to cross paths with possible friends and foes and hopscotch to cities such as Paris, Madrid, London, Tangier and New York. Each is introduced with wide aerial views often accompanied by distinctive police sirens and crisscrossing train tracks that slice the sprawling locations into puzzle pieces.

In "The Bourne Supremacy," Bourne's notebook was filled with fractured memories and the question, "Who was I?" Now, "Ultimatum," based on the Robert Ludlum novel and adapted by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi, provides answers to Bourne and the audience about who he is and what or who made him into a cold, efficient killer.

With Chris Cooper and Brian Cox out of the picture, Strathairn, Scott Glenn and Albert Finney enter from sinister stage left and join the returning Allen and, as conflicted agent Nicky Parsons, Julia Stiles.

Franka Potente, as Bourne's girlfriend, reappears in a flashback, in the haunting "Bourne Supremacy" scene in which she died and he tried to breathe life back into her -- while still under water -- before kissing her goodbye.

"Bourne Ultimatum," which poses unsettling, sometimes heavy-handed questions about the perversion of the idea of "saving American lives," could bring the franchise to a fitting close. But the subject of spies, going out or coming in from the cold corners of the world, is evergreen, if it turns out there's a fourth film in our future.