Oh, what a blessed relief.
With what should we compare Jeremy Renner's brief tenure as the charisma vacuum who's not quite Jason Bourne? To mention Alan Arkin's turn as Inspector Clouseau would be to demean a great character actor. To reference George Lazenby in On Her Majesty's Secret Service would be to talk down one of the better Bond movies.
Never mind that. Matt Damon, the most compelling tabula rasa in Hollywood, is back in place and, well, it's not quite as if he's never been away. It's as if he went away, the world changed and the original film-makers found ways of slotting those changes into the old machine's still-vigorous innards. Jason Bourne is the best marquee movie of the summer so far.
The return of Paul Greengrass, director of parts two and three, is at least as significant as the reappearance of Mr Damon. Originally a newsman for World in Action, Greengrass, also co-screenwriter here, was always likely to wind contemporary concerns into the new film. Sure enough, much of the story hangs around a breach of CIA cyber-security that gestures towards the Snowden case. We also get a characteristically brilliant action sequence set among protests on the streets of Athens.
The film begins with Bourne reduced to bare-knuckle brawling on the Albanian border. He is dragged back into the fray when long-term sidekick Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacks into the Company’s database - which still uses snazzy graphical interfaces easily understood by the average film-goer - and sets off red lights throughout the spook community.
The two old chums meet up in Greece where they break new ground in the field of automotive evasion. Jason Bourne has nothing to say about the situation in Athens. Our anti-hero comes to grief with the cops because they're the ones with the motorbikes and he - with Nicky on the pillion - needs to avoid fire-hoses and petrol bombs in the most spectacular manner possible.
How often does an editor receive a writing credit? Christopher Rouse, an Oscar-winner for Greengrass's The Bourne Ultimatum, has been so honoured here and - though it may trouble the Writers Guild of America - the decision does make a kind of sense. The lengthy Athens sequence is another masterpiece of organised chaos. Rouse allows the alert audience to keep fingernails imbedded in the story's fleeing hem as it speeds crazily from collision to conflagration. No other film series are so in thrall to acceleration.
Bourne then becomes caught up in a city-hopping shell game with his old bosses at the CIA. Tommy Lee Jones seems a little old to be head of that organisation; Alicia Vikander seems a little young to be its chief of cyber-espionage. Placing the wrinkliest man in Hollywood next to the smoothest skin in Sweden seems almost cruel: like casting a pedigree Shar-Pei alongside an egg. For all that, they are sufficiently committed to sell us a plot that occasionally stretches credulity.
This is a cynical era. These days the baddies are no longer traitors; they’re patriots doing their job with immoral vigour. The senior spies in Le Carré were professionally comprised. In the Bourne films they are required to behave like state-sponsored terrorists. Jones wears that Satanic mantle with great confidence. Vincent Cassel, coolly described as “The Asset”, is chilling as his dark angel.
None of which is to suggest that there is anything like a moral to Jason Bourne. Allowing its protagonist only a handful of isolated sighs for dialogue, the film is, as much as anything, a delivery system for a clattering action aesthetic that, devised by Doug Liman and Greengrass in the first two films, has now become an industry-wide cliché.
They leave us desperate for more with a closing chase throughout Las Vegas that suggests a similar action sequence in Diamonds are Forever. Hang on. Wasn't that Connery's first film back after the Lazenby interregnum? Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
