( Ultimatum’s critical and box-office success surely reassured Hollywood that politics can sit comfortably inside action blockbusters, and must have helped pave the way for everything from the overtly political plots of the Marvel movies to the fact that the Hunger Games movies got made at all.) Jason Bourne makes a few feints toward engaging with the spiraling disaster that is today’s zeitgeist, but it doesn’t do anything with them. It tries, but… Those early 2000s Bourne flicks had an urgency to them even when they weren’t directly addressing the global mess, and when they were - as in Ultimatum, the best of a terrific bunch - it made for crackerjack pop filmmaking.

No, it’s that the world has moved on from the initial confusion and upheaval - geopolitical, cultural, technological - of the years just after 9/11, and Jason Bourne can’t keep up with how much darker and grimmer the world we’ve moved into is. Whether it’s an exhausting motorcycle getaway from assassins through streets overrun by rioters in Athens or a relentless demolition derby through ordinary traffic in Las Vegas, we are right in the middle of the mayhem, bombarded by thrills and terror while never losing track of what is actually happening. (Greengrass did not direct the first film, 2002’s The Bourne Identity, but did helm the second and third, 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum.) He remains an absolute master of breathless nonstop action that, even as it embraces chaos, is never less than tightly controlled and supremely comprehensible. Nor has returning director Paul Greengrass lost his mojo. (Bourne appears to have been scraping out a meager living since we last saw him as a bare-knuckle boxer in underground fights, which perhaps necessitated getting pumped up.) Damon stalks around as if he is just barely restraining Bourne’s power, and when he unleashes it, he owns the screen, simultaneously indulging Bourne’s menace and suggesting that he hasn’t yet let it fully uncoil. In fact, his Bourne is significantly beefier here: bigger, more intimidating, just plain more dangerous in an all-muscle kind of way. Oh, it’s not that Damon ( The Martian, Interstellar), now 46 years old, isn’t up to the physical demands of the role. It’s been nine years since we last saw Matt Damon racing around the world and beating people up as brainwashed assassin Jason Bourne… and the weight of those interim years rests heavily upon this fourth installment.

Jason bourne movies in sequence