Not that utter incomprehension could stop one from enjoying the visceral action. Paul Greengrass, the director of United 93, sets a new standard for action movies here. He’s a maestro with the hand-held camera; if there was a shot from a locked-down tripod somewhere in there, it’s well disguised. The constantly floating camera creates a world where nothing is stable, not even loyalty or identity.

Greengrass is the anti-Michael Bay, generating adrenaline with barely perceptible blurs instead of iconic commercial imagery. For example, the fight sequence in an empty Tangiers apartment is now the benchmark by which hand-to-hand combat scenes should be judged.

Bourne and his opponent trade bare-knuckled blows with constantly increasing speed and intensity. No Hollywood distractions or kung-fu wire work dilutes the combat. Its just raw, unremitting physicality, moving too rapidly to allow thought. There’s no pause for contemplating mortality, no room for wisecracks, just swift, lethal reactions. The flurry of blows is relentless and breathtaking, and the camera pushes into the action, locking the audience right into the heart of the combat. By the time the knife gets whipped out, the hands are flying faster than perception can track them. It’s an exquisitely choreographed blur that is a crystal clear shot of adrenaline.

It’s a style that might be off-putting to some, but Greengrass goes for it with total commitment and a sure hand. Would you rather watch a movie that shows you candy-colored nothing in exacting detail? Or a movie that shows you abstract, real-time blurs that hit like a ton of bricks?

“You start down this path, and where does it end?” asks one agent.

“It ends when we’ve won,” is the cold reply.

The Bourne Ultimatum is set in the modern cold war, with ultra-advanced technology being deployed against ill-defined opponents. Spies without clearly defined sides using bulldozers to fight fog banks. The film’s color palette – all muted blues and grey – hardly separates the good guys from the bad guys. This is the new paranoia, which is just like the old paranoia but with sharper graphics. GPS and RFID can track modern spies to a fraction of an inch, it seems, but the big picture just gets more muddled.

Jason Bourne, as a character, is a curious counterpart to John McClane from the Die Hard series. This is the era of the mortal super-hero and the nebulous enemies. Twenty years ago, Bourne would have been a single-minded American soldier fighting the Russians. Now he’s a free agent, no longer a patriotic American, fighting a secret government program that hovers between the corrupt and the flat-out illegal. Bourne’s character is a virtual ghost, and his enemies are just as non-corporeal.

Unlike the acerbic John McClane, Jason Bourne doesn’t have a personality. He is as grim, efficient, and grey as a snub-nosed pistol. His chase is supposedly about unlocking the answers to his past for some semblance of redemption. The film, though, is all about the chase, which is an unending quest for answers. When it’s all said and done, neither Jason Bourne nor the audience cares that much for the final answer. There’s hardly a flicker of emotion when Bourne finds out his true history; and screenwriter Tony Gilroy keeps the final revelations brief and unremarkable. Bourne shrugs off a moment of understanding, using it to escape from another no-win situation, and keeps on running.

Answers, as it turns out, aren’t nearly as much fun as the chase for them. Or, to paraphrase Springsteen: Baby, he was Bourne to run, indeed.

What, then, to make of a film that crosses those lines without regard to the accuracies of fact, or the rules of espionage engagement? That question is at the heart of The Good Shepherd, Robert DeNiro’s stately film about the birth of the CIA. It follows the life of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), ostensibly a fictional character based on the CIA’s legendary chief of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton and Richard Bissell, who engineered the failed Bay Of Pigs operation.

The film spans Wilson’s life from his days at Yale to the war in Europe, through the heart of the cold war to the founding of the CIA. Shunning the well-known historical peaks, The Good Shepherd is content with the shadows. The Bay Of Pigs fiasco is quickly shrugged off, while the interrogation of a defecting Russian general is rendered with a singular intensity. Alive with small details and shadows; focusing on emotionless men hiding secrets with lies, the blurred line between fiction and reality becomes jarring. With each betrayal, the narrative power is undercut by the unrelenting question of what’s real and what’s manufactured.

The blurred lines between truth and reality are virtually meaningless in the bold Hollywood strokes of Braveheart and J.F.K. Here, those blurred lines are so close to the heart of the film that they threaten to overwhelm the whole endeavor. When Wilson romances a pretty, but deaf student at Yale, it feels like a distraction. It’s too cinematic to be true, but so crucial that it would be disappointing to have been invented outright. When offered a choice between a honeymoon with his newly-pregnant wife (played with cool reserve by Angelina Jolie) and a six year stint in a war-torn Europe, the choice is a no-brainer.

The anti-James Bond, Wilson is not a dashing, flamboyant practitioner of espionage. Instead, he is a measured, steely eyed bureaucrat, so quiet that even his suits have the uncanny ability to match the wallpaper of any given room, providing a white collar camouflage to further help him disappear in plain sight. There’s something dissonant about Wilson, something too contrived. The facts of the CIA’s creation are little known and fascinating, but the character of Wilson is a blurry lens to examine them. As the story unfolds, questions about what is real and what is contrived hover in almost every scene, to the point of distraction. It’s a disorienting spin through a period of history where the art of disinformation was perfected. Everything in the movie has the tactile slipperiness of a spy movie; whole scenes are lost in elusive dialogue and neutral-toned walls, and at the same time it’s engrossing – almost overwhelming – and at the same time oddly distant and opaque.

Matt Damon delivers a terrific and intense performance, but it remains unconvincing. All too often it calls to mind high school theater, watching a Willy Loman who can’t yet buy a six-pack unconvincingly rage against the indignities of a failed life. His face, even when blank, remains too young. Plus, it’s completely out of the realm of possibility that he and Angelina Jolie could spawn such an awkward, asymmetrical son.

Out of loyalty to country, Wilson will sacrifice or betray everyone close to him, choosing the cold halls of paranoia over the warm corruptibility of emotional bonds. Through all the opacity, though, The Good Shepherd makes the emotional calculus of principles over emotion painfully clear. We never learn what makes Wilson tick, but we carefully watch every virtue he is dedicated to protecting get stripped from him. Like Al Pacino’s ascension in The Godfather, the descent is precisely detailed, and excruciating to watch.

The title is abbreviated from the biblical phrase “the good shepherd lays down his life for his flock.” A better biblical reference might be to ask what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul? Apparently a corner office in Washington.