The original Bourne trilogy (let’s not speak of the regrettable attempt at passing the torch from Matt Damon to Jeremy Renner in The Bourne Supremacy) was made up of movies that were bruisingly, brilliantly precise in their action and less so in terms of the relevance they flirted with. Their paranoia, cynicism, and grim envisioning of murders being committed in the name of national security felt timely without offering direct correlations, and were ultimately more about setting a dark tone than making an incisive comment.



But of all the indignities Damon’s title character, dug out of retirement after nine years, has to suffer in the disappointing Jason Bourne, the worst is how out-of-touch the new conspiracy he unravels feels, particularly when compared with fellow recent release Nerve. A romantic thriller about an iPhone game from Catfish directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, Nerve is sharper and smarter about surveillance and social media than the latest installment of the spy franchise. Which might be less surprising if Jason Bourne weren’t so concerned with both topics, which are revealed to be integral to the CIA’s latest nefarious black ops program.

After years of operations with tasteful furniture-line names like Treadstone and Blackbriar, the CIA has focused its attention on something more practical and less overtly murder-y called Iron Hand, which is connected to a Google/Facebook-like company run by Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed). Despite the ominous label, Iron Hand turns out to be a lot less dramatic than the previous Bourne initiatives, in which handsome men were expertly trained, lightly brainwashed, and then positioned as sleeper agent assassins around the world.

Jason Bourne compensates for its lack of urgency by stretching for greater relevance, with Silicon Valley dealings, a Julian Assange stand-in, and anti-austerity riots. But it just comes across as naive. Its version of the CIA, dominated by a crusty member of the old guard (Tommy Lee Jones) and a steely representative of the new (Alicia Vikander), is prepared to kill to cover up the fact that it’s demanding backdoor access to a widely used social media application — inexplicable given that the FBI and Apple have been having a similar battle out in the open for a while now. The Bourne movies have always existed in a world in constant surveillance, the reach of which has grown in each installment, and yet this latest film has more optimistic ideas about expectations of privacy than the average internet denizen.