Jason Bourne Review

With 2004’s espionage sequel The Bourne Supremacy, director Paul Greengrass changed the face of popcorn thrillers, combining the docudrama grit of Bloody Sunday with super-slick thrills that left the Bond franchise in the dust

- Bob Matthew

So successful were the Bourne movies that when Greengrass and leading man Matt Damon walked away from the Robert Ludlum-inspired series after the perfect ending of 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, the studio cooked up The Bourne Legacy, an empty actioner with a gaping hole where its star and soul should be, idly trading on the memory of past glories.

Now, after reuniting on 2010’s underrated Green Zone, Damon and Greengrass are back with Jason Bourne, a breathlessly confident thriller with a self-consciously modern edge that casts its antihero adrift in a post-Snowden world of surveillance and social media. Replete with heated exchanges about the pay-off between personal privacy and public order, the new movie (written by Greengrass and his longterm editor, Christopher Rouse) combines fist-fighting with cyber-stalking in impressively ruthless fashion, barrelling through its contemporary landscape like a cinematic bull in a rolling-news China shop.