In his third outing as the amnesiac agent Jason Bourne, Matt Damon maintains the low-drag efficiency he established in the first two installments - David Denby in the New Yorker even compares him to a bullet - as he relentlessly backtracks the genesis of his former secret identity to its source. As appropriate for the endcap to an informal trilogy, the knobs are all ratcheted up - chases are notably extended, nominal allies within the CIA themselves are put at risk, and Bourne’s counterespionage chops put to ever greater challenges. Yet somewhere in the process, we lose some of the balance that was previously maintained between cat and mouse, and thus some of the critical tension that came from it. Before we get to that, however, let’s revisit how we got to this point in the story.

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