Bourne again

“In The Bourne Ultimatum, as in the first two instalments, the only bad guys are CIA operatives. They think little of bugging phones, using spycams to track troublesome elements, shooting uppity journalists, and blowing up CIA men gone wrong in the teeming streets of foreign cities. As Cosmo Landesman says in The Sunday Times, Bourne is ‘the perfect liberal hero’. He allows ‘liberals to enjoy all the forbidden pleasures of the espionage blockbuster: they can see him kick ass, break necks, smash faces and shoot fellow human beings, and not complain about civil liberties because the victims work for the CIA’. Bourne is, says Landesman, ‘the John Rambo of the liberal intelligentsia’ […]Bourne is a ‘humanitarian’ action hero. His character captures the shift from foreign ventures designed to boost the authority of the West to international escapades designed to flatter the egos of crisis-ridden Westerners. […] Matt Damon is the perfect actor to play such a character. He’s good-looking but not dazzlingly handsome, and he permanently wears a blank expression. If Bond’s effortless charm and super-coolness was meant to reflect that Brits are the best in the world at foreign diplomacy, and Schwarzenegger’s ridiculous muscles were supposed to symbolise America’s brute strength in the face of weasely foreign enemies, then Damon/Bourne’s namelessness and plainness capture a culture that doesn’t really know what it stands for.” Brendan O’Neill, “Jason Bourne: a ‘John Rambo for liberals.”