JASON BOURNE

I was wanting to watch an undemanding action film to take my mind off a toothache I was suffering from, and this unnecessary addition to the Bourne franchise was made to order.

It has the familiar formula: Jason (Matt Damon) is simply trying to find out more about his past, but the CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, at his most gnarly) is so worried that Jason will release incriminating info about the CIA's latest blackop projects that he will stop at nothing to have him killed.

The film has two major new characters.  There is Alicia Vikander as Heather Lee, the CIA head of Cyber Ops, an ambiguous figure who ends up helping Jason for her own reasons.  And there is 'the Asset', a CIA assassin who blames Jason for being captured and tortured in Syria (played by Vincent Cassel).

There's also a bit of a subplot which ends up not adding a great deal, wasting Riz Ahmed as a Mark Zuckerberg-type character.

The main plot is kicked off by Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacking into CIA files and getting them to Jason in Athens.  Here we get the first of three action set-pieces which ends powerfully with Nicky being killed by the Asset (I know, what a ridiculous name). 

At the start of the film Jason is in a bad way, off the grid as a street fighter, plagued by flashbacks.  But once he learns more of his father's involvement in Treadstone, he has a new purpose, to find out why his father was killed.

This takes him to London, for my favourite set-piece of the film, which is less action-orientated than the others, as Dewey sabotages Heather's operation and tries to use the Asset to get rid of Jason once and for all.

We then move swiftly to Las Vegas for the climactic action sequences, first an assassination attempt by the Asset, then a car chase, then a fight to the death between Jason and the Asset (who it turns out, surprise, surprise, was the guy who knocked off his dad).

It's done competently enough (director Paul Greengrass can do this sort of thing in his sleep) but it's all a bit predictable, and of course one can't help feeling that it was done a whole lot better in the original trilogy.  

On the other hand the film made a shedload of money, and it did distract me from my toothache.