Paul Greengrass’s “The Bourne Ultimatum” is the best action movie of the summer. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a very good summer.

A fizzy, rocketing, high-speed chase across the planet that traces a black river of evil deeds back to their source in Midtown Manhattan, this is a sleek, chic movie that moves at the speed of a bike messenger. But within 15 minutes of leaving the theater, you’re going to feel more than a little disappointed; this flick gets you drunk on action, but leaves you with a head-splitting hangover once you sober up.

Kicking off within seconds of the ending of the second installment of the Bourne trilogy, “The Bourne Supremacy” (quick plot recap: Bourne is happy with girlfriend, bad guys kill girlfriend, Bourne kills bad guys), “The Bourne Ultimatum” starts in fourth gear as the amnesiac rogue CIA assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) begins to have blurry, backstory-revealing flashbacks while beating up Russian police with one hand and treating his own wounds with the other. Meanwhile, journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) is publishing a series of articles sourced from a leak in the CIA, one of which is a profile of Bourne.

Printing the name “Jason Bourne” conjures up the man himself, and before you can say “frequent flyer,” Bourne is trying to make Ross reveal his sources, while a CIA rendition team arrives to kidnap Ross because he knows too much. Obviously, this takes place on an alternate Earth, where the CIA is capable of tying its own shoelaces.

The movie is one long, breathless foot/moped/car chase that dashes from Moscow, to London, to Madrid, to Tangiers, and then to New York. In an attempt to intensify the movie’s frantic energy, Mr. Greengrass has stuck with his epileptic cameraman, who was obviously employed on the first two “Bourne” films, and who only shoots when he’s in the midst of a grand mal seizure, giving the movie a jerky, hectic quality that makes you feel as though you’re being repeatedly poked with a cattle prod.

The technique is initially electrifying, but eventually it makes you a little numb. The swirling mass of plots and subplots is all held together by Mr. Damon, who has acquired a convincing physicality after years of the Bourne workout: constant running, leaping, kicking, hitting, and then more running. Mr. Damon’s Bourne uses his body rather than his mouth to express his feelings, and the actor has gotten so good at it that he’s only been given about five lines of dialogue in the entire movie. All five of them feel superfluous. Jason Bourne is a brilliant cinematic invention. Familiar with every back-alley in every city in the world, Bourne can fire a gun, perform impromptu surgery, hotwire a motorcycle, dodge surveillance, wire a bomb, and, one assumes, play first violin in a symphony orchestra if necessary. James Bond combined pleasure with his business, but Jason Bourne is all business, and on a planet in which most world leaders are nincompoops who can’t even invade a country properly, it’s deeply thrilling to witness his workmanlike efficiency.

Again and again, Bourne quietly and methodically turns the tables on the better-funded, better-equipped agencies that pursue him, and each time it happens, the audience feels a little jolt of excitement because it’s reminded that this is how you take care of business.

It’s only when you’re riding the subway home later that you realize that “The Bourne Ultimatum” is a beat-for-beat remake of “The Bourne Supremacy.” Granted, “Ultimatum” springs directly off of the end of “Supremacy,” and about halfway through its running time it cleverly re-writes the tacked-on New York City coda of “Supremacy” that had previously stood out like a sore thumb. But once the camera stops shaking, you realize that in both movies the exact same events occur in almost the exact same order.

Fake passports are used to “send a message.” There’s a fight with a martial artist in an E-Z break house; agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) is emotionally traumatized by violence; Bourne talks to the people hunting him on the phone before they realize — oh my god! — he’s watching them from across the street; there’s a high-impact car chase en route to an emotional one-on-one encounter that closes the movie and, taking a note from the end of “The Bourne Identity,” there’s a Senate subcommittee hearing to wrap everything up.

Of course, if repetition were a sin, then the James Bond series would have ended with 1964’s “Goldfinger,” but there’s something offensive about the way Mr. Greengrass plays it safe. Jason Bourne takes outrageous risks, relying on his skills to get him through alive, whereas Mr. Greengrass is happy to repeat the same, safe setups and payoffs as in the previous two installments in order to produce a predictable profit machine. It’s like going home with some amazingly sexy person who makes you feel like a million bucks, only to wake up the next morning and remember that he or she jumped out of your birthday cake.

The audience should take a cue from “The Bourne Identity” playbook: Immediately after the movie is over, you should get shot three times, fall off a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and develop trauma-induced amnesia. There are some good movies that don’t bear re-watching. “The Bourne Ultimatum” is a great movie that doesn’t bear remembering.