Jason Bourne (Paul Greengrass, 2016)

Matt Damon is dragged out of hiding again through his ongoing quest to find out the whys and wherefores of his murky past, although by now it's difficult to see what else he needs to unearth, besides even more evidence of the CIA's utter villainy. To emphasise this, a secondary plot is added where the Agency Director (Tommy Lee Jones, effectively the Emperor from Star Wars) decides that a social media billionaire who won't play ball with them on allowing access to every user's personal details has to be bumped off. Then many, many foot chases and several city-wrecking car chases ensue across the usual assortment of locations, including Athens, Berlin, London and Las Vegas, with scant room for dialogue, particularly from the hero himself. There's very little credible espionage involved any more, and when the brave new face of the Agency declares at the end that Tommy Lee Jones's character belonged to the past, presumably with his propensity to reach immediately for guns rather than computers, one has to conclude that the makers of this are stuck with the same quandary. It is very difficult to make the technobabble of real modern spy games thrilling. But this really shouldn't be the way to go any more, even if the requisite thrills are still efficiently generated.

5/10