Movie Nation

Comic books and the ultimate movie nerd. A marriage made in hell.

The champagne is popping over at STX, the new kid on the smaller-distributor block (“The Gift,” “Free State of Jones”, “Hardcore Henry”) that thought an R-rated comedy in the “Bad Teacher/Bad Santa/Bridesmaids/Hangover” mold, one about Modern Motherhood, would hit.

They were right. “Bad Moms,” despite lacking big box office leading ladies — Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Christina Applegate, Jada Pinkett-Smith — may clear $27 million on its opening weekend, the studio’s biggest opening ever. 

Universal has to be feeling relieved at its decision to pay Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass and Julia Stiles to come back for another batch of Bourne. “Jason Bourne” is on track to win the weekend, based on late Thursday/Friday numbers, with a $60 million+ opening.

A few years ago, Emma Roberts announced she was walking away from the family business (Julia Roberts and Eric Roberts are aunt and uncle) in frustration. Playing too many teenagers, apparently. Well, she had one more in her (she’s an ageless 25) and “Nerve”is turning out to be her biggest hit outside of “Valentine’s Day.” It’s headed toward a healthy $16-17 million opening since Wed. Not dazzling, but something.

“Ghostbusters” is fading, and has lost over 600 screens, but will still be over $105 million by Monday AM. A flop? It’ll top out at $120 million domestic, so adding in foreign and post-theatrical, if they make a sequel, it’ll have to be cheaper. Re-establishing the brand may indeed convince Sony to re-up. Maybe shoot in someplace cheaper.

Flops that don’t even come close to not being flops  were “The Infiltrator” and especially “The BFG” which are plunging with no prayer of recovering even a large fraction of their production costs.

“Cafe Society” added screens, but is still doing piddling numbers, even for a Woody Allen comedy. “Ab Fab” added screens, still not enough to bounce into the top 10.

“Lights Out” is holding audience, as is “Hillary’s America,” bringing in an audience that normally doesn’t go to the movies any more.

“Logic,” the great thriller director Alfred Hitchcock once intoned, “is dull.”

So don’t try to pin down the geography of the long chase that is “North by Northwest,” don’t question too deeply how “The Birds” were able to pin down an entire rural California town of Bodega (Bay) and don’t waste a moment of your life fearing for the safety of Cary Grant or James Stewart in any Hitchcock film they did.

Janet Leigh, of course, was another matter.

The moment Hitch made this declaration was a mid-1960s interview, and the person he made it to was the French critic turned director, Francois Truffaut. Truffaut was largely responsible for raising Hitchcock’s “action/mystery hack” reputation to the pantheon of artist of “the pure cinema.” And once he became a director himself, the two formed a mutual admiration society that Truffaut immortalized with the taped interviews that became the seminal book on Hitchcock and one of the great pieces of cinematic deconstruction in book form — “Hitchcock/Truffaut.”

Now “Hitchcock/Truffaut” has become a documentary film about “The Master of Suspense,” one built on those long-ago audio tapes. The two talk as peers, with Truffaut getting Hitch to defend his infamous “Actors are cattle” put-down, and dig into the layers of his lifetime of learning to make “pure cinema,” a filmmaker whose inner demons made it to the screen in movies visualized as perfect expressions of this most visual of arts.

“There’s no such thing as a face,” Hitchcock theorizes. “It doesn’t exist until the light hits it.”

He over-planned his pictures, visually, with storyboards. By the time he had to actually show up on set with actors hired to fulfill his vision, he was already a little bored with the story he was determined to tell with visual archetypes, tropes and clues.

Every so often, as he talks about the sexual subtexts of scenes and situations, he playfully orders Truffaut, the translator and the sound tech with them to “turn off the machine,” to say something more off-color than his image let on.

There’s Hitch, “acting” and cutting up on with double entendres camera with a starlet for a screen test in the early days of sound.

Trained as an engineer, he dipped his feet into silent cinema as a designer, composer of inter-titles and then director as visual “writer,” the “auteur” or author of his films. It didn’t matter who the collaborating screenwriter was or who was credited with design and editing. Hitchcock’s movies bear his distinct signature, and are as instantly recognizable as “his” as any movies ever made bear the trademark of their creator.

The Kent Jones documentary adds a number of new interviews with filmmakers from Scorsese to Fincher, James Gray to Richard Linklater (perhaps the most astute analyst of Hitch), men inspired to pursue cinema as their means of expression by this watershed book.

I say “men” because this doc is something of a boy’s club. All the famous scenes sampled, from “The Lodger” to “Psycho,” “Notorious” to “Vertigo,” may lean heaviest on Hitchcock’s women — his great female stars. But no female critics appear, and even the surviving “Hitchcock blondes” were not interviewed for this film.

Truth be told, the new interviews don’t add much except for words of admiration for this Holy Text of film appreciation. And as the book was largely in a question and answer (transcribed from the tapes), the film offers no fresh revelations.

He was one of the first directors to become a “brand name,” like Capra and Ford and later Spielberg and Fincher (“Se7en”, “Zodiac”). We hear Hitch remark, in answer to a 1965 question, that his movies “aren’t old-fashioned,” something you could certainly say during his lifetime.

But even though none of the director/fans interviewed come out and say it, you have to wonder how true that is fifty years later. The sampled clips remind us of how Hitch handled foreshadowing (obvious enough for everybody in the audience to get it) and his simplistic (in step with the times) takes on psychology. They’re dated. They’d have to be.

The better filmmakers of today are much more subtle. Nobody interviewed here would have ended “Psycho” with Simon Oakland offering a paint-by-numbers psychological breakdown of Norman Bates. His movies might still resemble dreams (his dreams), but they can seem ham-fisted and entirely too on-the-nose in the casting, in the sexual predilections of his villains.

“Hitchcock/Truffaut” remains an influential book because the movies still resonate with nascent film buffs, and this documentary serves to remind us that we underestimate the creators of popular entertainment at our peril. All it takes is a Frenchman “discovering” the genius behind the work to make see the popcorn pictures of any era in a new light.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for suggestive material and violent images

Cast: Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, James Gray, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Balaban
Credits: Directed by Kent Jones, script by Kent Jones, Serge Toubiana. A Cohen Media Group/HBO release.

Running time: 1:19

Matt Damon isn’t winning universal praise for returning to “Jason Bourne,” nor is director Paul Greengrass. Weak reviews won’t give a boost to the spy who fears his government franchise.

But it won’t need reviews to make money.

Box Office Mojo figures “Bourne” will clear $50, but not come as close to $60 as “Star Trek Beyond” did last weekend. Franchise to franchise, the fanbase is thinner and “Jason Bourne” is riding worse reviews.

Box Office Guru ignores Bourne’s bad reviews (and conversely thinks “Bad Moms” will suffer due to reviews) and predicts a $57 million weekend for Damon/Tommy Lee Jones and Alicia Vikander. Vincent Cassel makes a wonderful if under-motivated villain.

Mojo thinks “Moms” will manage $25, perfectly respectable for an R-rated comedy and the biggest hit that infant studio STX has ever had. Guru calls it a $23 million hit.

And Box Office Mojo figures “Nerve” did its briskest business Wednesday and is headed for a $12-13 million opening. The Guru expects $16 million by Sunday night. I think it’ll do better. Word of mouth should be decent.

“Star Trek Beyond” will lose north of 50%, as a fading franchise. “Ghostbusters” will start losing screens, big time, as it clears $100 million today, darkening its prospects of finishing in the $120-130 million range in the US.

Actually, when you add up the notices, all three wide releases this weekend sit right on the cusp of widely endorsed.

The dislike is lukewarm, the endorsements likewise.

That goes for “Jason Bourne,” an all-chase, no character-development return to the franchise for Paul Greengrass (director) and Matt Damon (star).

It should make some money, though reviews won’t help it. Not at all.

“Bad Moms” has a likable cast that isn’t entirely at home delivering a mommy track “Hangover.” That sort of R-rated comedy requires more than an under-paid bit player’s nudity, a few joints and whippets and a lot of F-bombs.

You need tigers and Mike Tyson and humiliation. These ladies want to make nice, with their makeup and hair in place even in moments of wild abandon. Only Kathryn Hahn delivers the goods. Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell (to a lesser degree) lost their nerve and compromised the comedy.

Weak reviews for this one. But not beat-downs. It doesn’t quite come off.

“Nerve” has a killer premise — young people suckered into a privacy-stealing/life threatening online game through peer pressure, naivete and greed. And it’s got compatible co-stars — Emma Roberts (one more teenager, dear, that’s all you get) and Dave Franco. It works well enough It works well enough, and again, even the pans aren’t of the scorched earth variety.

“Bourne” could displace “Star Trek Beyond,” and “Bad Moms” could suck more audience away from “Ghostbusters.” In theory. If teens can put down their phones long enough, “Nerve” could do some business.

“Nerve” is a thriller that almost lives up to its name.

A jumpy and tech-savvy plunge into the Digital Death of Privacy that today’s youngest webheads/cell-addicts are embracing, it manages to be cautionary but cute, menacing but alluring at the same time.

It has “don’t try this at home” built into it. But whose kids would be able to resist an online game that pays them cash for every “dare” their crowd-sourced “watchers” present them with? That’s the scary thing. Reading about Pokemon Go addicts falling off cliffs makes this a timely nail-biter for the digital age.

Emma Roberts, who replaced the late Dick Clark as “The World’s Oldest Teenager” (she’s 25), is Venus, or “Vee” to her friends. A mild-mannered Staten Island teen/high school photographer who wishes she could go to college in California, she’s stuck with her single mom (Juliette Lewis) and the ghost of her dead older brother.

Not literally. This isn’t that kind of thriller.

Her libidinous pal Sydney (Emily Meade of “That Awkward Moment”)  warns her that “life is passing you by.” She needs to get out there, take a chance. Maybe by playing this new open-sourced online game, Nerve.

And all the warnings from her non-threatening boy pal/tech nerd Tommy (Miles Heizer) won’t keep her from playing. It looks like fun, and a way to come out of one’s shell.

The dares include “kiss a stranger” and “eat dog food,” do it live on camera.

“That is so not LIKE you!”

“That’s the POINT!”

The rules are simple. You’re given a challenge, with a cash reward promised. “Fail, or bail.” But don’t tell the authorities. “Snitches get stitches.”

Amy opts in. She’s a “player,” not a “watcher.” Next thing you know, she’s defied the laws of physics and New York mass transit to make a date in Manhattan from Staten Island, kissing a promising stranger reading Virginia Woolf in a diner.

He’s played by Dave Franco. “Ian” is then challenged to serenade the place and put on a show. He sings along to Roy Orbison. Well-played.

Despite Tommy’s misgivings, Amy dashes off into the night, partnered up with Ian for a series of online challenges which reveal just how much the game community knows about them and just how much control that group mind can exercise. The group, “Watchers,” pick the challenges. Members of the group manipulate the dares by, for instance, stealing their clothes when they’re dared to try on impossibly expensive clothes at Bergdorf Goodman. They watch the couple’s every move.

Of course, the challenges take on a sinister tint. Of course, Amy and Ian connect, but can they trust each other?

Of course, the game-fanatic Sydney resents growing online fame Vee is gathering. And of course, Tommy’s tech-savvy with the “dark web” will have a role to play.

The “Cat Fish” veterans behind the camera do only a passable job of setting this up and ratcheting up the suspense. Occasional flashes of wit and style stand out, because much of the film is routine looking and playing. The last third of the script lets them all down.

Roberts is still a winsome presence, and Franco (“Now You See Me”) suggests both disarming, dopey charm and mysterious menace, just right for the part.

The game? It’s a clever conceit, and evocative of the engrossing/all involving Pokemon phone game that took the nation by storm last week, and seems like yesterday’s news already. The chilling part of this, the way the game and its dares could be customized to suit players based on their online profiles — Afraid of heights? Dangle from this ladder/construction crane — is as plausible as any given week’s data-mining revelations can make it.

The stars give “Nerve” its charm, and the challenges, some well-handled (blind-folded motorcycle rides through the city), have an immediacy that pays off.

It doesn’t always work and the story lets us off the hook too easily. But “Nerve” is a smart and reasonably taut thriller aimed at a generation that may be hard to convince to put stop sharing with strangers, and to put down its phones long enough to watch.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic material involving dangerous and risky behavior, some sexual content, language, drug content, drinking and nudity-all involving teens

Cast: Emma Roberts, Dave Franco, Juliette Lewis, Emily Meade, Miles Heizer
Credits: Directed by Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, script by  Jessica Sharzer based on the Jeanne Ryan novel.  A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:36

If only “Bad Moms” possessed the guts to live down to its title, the wit to deliver on its premise.

An over-reach for a “Hangover” styled spin on motherhood with drugs, sex, booze and “experimentation,” it reaches “raucous” on occasion. There are laughs, a disproportionate number of them coming from the lone trained comic in the cast, Kathryn Hahn.

But like “Ghostbusters,” it loses something every time it wallows in sisterhood sentimentality. Yeah, moms have it rough, and a lot of them screw up a lot of the time. Making sweet and nice about it rubs the edges off the comedy, building up to a finale that is saccharine and sloppy and dissatisfying.

It’s a Mila Kunis vehicle, and therein is problem one. She’s a funny woman, sitcom trained. But she’s bland as Amy, an over-scheduled, hovering/smothering mother of two who does her kids’ homework and agonizes over every bad grade, every soccer team final cut. She’s got no edge.

Amy is the oldest “by far” at the nerdy coffee company start-up where she’s overworked and underpaid. Her compensation, from infantile boss Dale (Clark Duke of “Hot Tub Time Machine”)?

“You guys ARE the greatest generation!”

She’s 32.

Catching dopey husband Mike (David Walton, bleh) in an online sexual relationship with a voyeur is the last straw. But even when she hits the bottle and backs away from her servile life of babying her kids, Amy is too put-together because Kunis doesn’t have the guts to let it all hang out. Morning After Makeup? Perfect. Hangover hair? Just as perfect.

“Checking out” of over-mothering puts Amy in conflict with the dictator of her suburban Chicago middle school, the PTA president, Gwendolyn (Christina Applegate, on the nose). She rules the school from the driver’s seat of her Range Rover, lording over her “Mean Girls” (Jada Pinkett Smith, Annie Mumulo) and judging one and all.

On the plus side, Amy finds two new drinking buddies, home schooler/slave Kiki (Kristen Bell) and free-range barfly mom Carla (Hahn). They close down the pubs, demolish supermarkets and rage about how “impossible it is to be a good mom” in this day and age.

They’ve tried. Well, Carla hasn’t. But the other two have tried to be “Tiger Moms.” They resolve to become Tequila Moms instead.

The laughs, scattered throughout the film and many of them only a mother will appreciate, are strictly of the low-hanging-fruit variety. Amy ends up running against Gwendolyn to free the school from endless PTA meetings, bake sales and high-stress extra-curriculars. To do that, she’s got to appeal to every constituency — “the sad moms, the lesbian moms, the black moms, the black lesbian moms, the drunk moms, the camel-toe moms.”

Hahn, who is EVERYwhere these days, brings a bracing vulgarity to Carla, a broad character broadly played like a broad. She coaches Amy on dating the hunky widower (Jay Hernandez) at school.

“Are you trying to get laid,” she bellows about Amy’s choice of outfit, “or get ADOPTED?”

If every performance was pitched at that level, this might be hackneyed and predictable, but at least it would play.  The laughs just aren’t there. Throwing in a torrent of F-bombs was the male co-directors’ solution to every dead spot.

A moment of nudity, slo-mo montages of the trio getting bombed, their parties, dancing and groping the produce clerk at the supermarket don’t cover the plot holes and laugh gaps.

Still, there are a few more giggles here than in the similarly-themed “Mom’s Night Out,” a faith-based comedy with a lot of the same motherhood gripes and a few good ideas stolen from “Adventures in Babysitting.”

But “Moms’ Night Out” is a no-holds-barred date that ends by 11, a party nobody calls the cops to break up and a “walk of shame” that includes a trip to the spa and hairdressers before coming home after a night spent with a stranger. It’s too prim and proper to be bad.

MPAA Rating:R for sexual material, full frontal nudity, language throughout, and drug and alcohol content

Cast: Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Christina Applegate, Jay Hernandez, Jada Pinkett Smith, Wanda Sykes
Credits: Written and directed by Jon Lucas, Scott Moore. An STX release.

Running time: 1:41

They weren’t much to start with, but the “Ice Age” movies are officially two or three installments past their expiration date with “Ice Age: Collision Course.”

A laugh-starved kids’ cartoon, it has nothing to recommend it to adults save for the opening credits confirmation that America’s Omnipresent Astronomer, Neil DeGrasse-Tyson, has finally jumped the shark.

He lends his opening narration to a science-averse comedy that has anthropomorphized mammals sharing the Earth with dinosaurs and a nutty squirrel in space thanks to “Ancient Astronauts.”

All in good “dumb” fun he assures us.

Only it isn’t. The critters face extinction — again — as meteors rain upon the Earth, the planetary “cleansing” that comes along every 100 million years or so, a wise weasel (Simon Pegg) informs the extended family of Manny the Mammoth (Ray Romano). Better take cover.

Jennifer Lopez classes up the clan as mate to saber-toothed Denis Leary. John Leguizamo gets all the worst one-liners.

“You are the wind beneath my…fleas!”

But Pegg, playing an eyepatch-wearing recurring character, provides a deliciously loony hint of where the laughs should have come from, songs — all of them derived from the “Marriage of Figaro.” That’s opera, Doc.

More Pegg, please. Less of everything else. But then, it’s too late for that. “Collision Course” is already a bomb.

MPAA Rating: PG for mild rude humor and some action/peril

Cast: The voices of Ray Romano, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Lopez, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Simon Pegg and Neil DeGrasse-Tyson
Credits: Directed by Mike Thurmeir, Galen T. Chu, script by Michael J. Wilson, Michael Berg, Yoni Brenner. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:34

There’s something inherently hilarious about the very idea of Dinesh D’Souza, a smug brown foreign person pandering to elderly, xenophobic white persons as he demonizes the political party that represents most other brown persons in his adopted country.

Not as hilarious as his view of himself, of course. D’Souza, a conservative “scholar,” is a martyr to the cause,  a man sent to prison for trying to buy an election. He recreates his trial and his “prison” experience in his latest documentary, “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.”

The fact that he starts his film off with this eye-rolling trial and “hard time” filled with bad actors as smirking reporters and a lecturing judge annoyed at D’Souza’s claims of naivete — and FAILS TO LABEL IT AS RE-CREATED, with actors and editorializing, not real footage — makes you question everything that follows. His latest red meat to the Red States Jeremiad about America — and how this ill-informed Indian immigrant thinks America is going wrong — is laugh out loud hypocrisy for an audience of suckers.

Not that the questions are hard. D’Souza distorts history, defames FDR and LBJ and Margaret Sanger and settles on his favorite whipping boys — the late leftist activist Saul Alinsky and those he claims are doing Alinsky’s “dirty work” — Barack Obama and The Clintons.

But as he panders to an audience that Donald Trump’s candidacy has outed as virulently racist, clinging to the Confederate flag and a political party where KKK members still run for office on the GOP ticket, D’Souza celebrates “The Party of Lincoln,” questions why African Americans abandoned the party that freed the slaves and pushed for equal protection under the law during Reconstruction.

Why do you think, “scholar”?

He demonizes Andrew Jackson, the first Democrat, as a genocidal racist slave owner, but fails to note the legions of Republicans throwing tantrums to keep Andy J. on the $20 bill.

Like that most polished propagandist, Rush Limbaugh, he pushes Goebbels’ “Big Lie,” starting with crediting himself as prophetic with his previous anti-Obama screed, listing all the things he said would come to pass, but didn’t, but which he assures us did. Naked lies play to this crowd.

In Obama’s America, this smirking elitist narrates from the back of his chauffeured luxury SUV (again, irony), rights and the Constitution have been under constant assault. Then he mixes up his early history of the Republican party, builds a vast conspiracy that the Democratic Party has used to keep black people down, and ignores the decades of real scholarship that explain the GOP’s descent into race-baiting, “the Southern strategy” where racists found a political home.

That his many images of the Civil War, heroic boys in blue slaughtering the traitorous racist rebel Southern Democrats under the Stars and Bars, doesn’t grate with his audience should teach him something. This is important history, but ancient history. The recent history is what he needs to ignore. So nothing about Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” Nothing about Lee Atwater, Jesse Helms, etc. — an endless parade of bigots and race-baiters.

He fills the last 15 minutes of the movie with “God Bless America” and “The Star Spangled Banner” and country music has-been Larry Gatlin singing a patriotic ditty commissioned for the film. Who is gullible enough to fall for this? His target audience should be insulted.

D’Souza, naif to American history that he is, could have done a real service instead of being another right wing Pied Piper leading the lemmings off a cliff. He could have asked “What happened to Our/My Republican Party?” and given blunt, truth-spoken-to-power answers. He’d rather trash the divided America that GOP policies in large part divided

Racial identity voting, which LBJ predicted when he shoved through the Civil Rights and Votings Rights Acts, shifted. Why doesn’t he ask about and explore that? It’s important to the country’s, and the GOP’s future. He could watch HBO’s historically-vetted “LBJ” movie for research. Watch it in the back of his limo.

Nixon deployed “the Southern Strategy” to seize control of the conservative, white South, and people like Bush the Elder played the demonizing black criminals card to win elections. Donald Trump apes Nixon’s infamous “America on fire” 1968 speech at the GOP convention. The party base shrinks and shrinks, the bile builds and builds, and nobody remembers the celebrated GOP past that D’Souza wants to revive.

Elections have to be bought, or gerrymandered, when your base is dying off faster than oxygen-tanked crowd I saw “Hillary’s America” with. The GOP is getting older, whiter, madder and smaller in number. The “Big Tent” is shrinking.

Asking hard questions like “Is there one GOP member of Congress who would support one piece of Civil Rights or Reconstruction legislation today?” and “Why not?” would be helpful, to his adopted country and D’Souza’s adopted party. I’m being serious.

Does D’Souza even know that there used to be something called a “liberal Republican”?

The answer to all this is “No.” Or it doesn’t serve D’Souza’s pandering need to pack his pocketbook. When it comes to American history, the only real lesson he’s learned is credited to P.T. Barnum.

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some violence, thematic elements and smoking

Cast:Dinesh D’Souza, Jonah Goldberg, Peter Schweizer
Credits: Written and directed by Dinesh D’Souza, Bruce Schooley. A Pureflix release.

Running time: 1:46

The Bourne bodycount soars as Bourne bystanders are mowed down by that Bourne in a china shop, the Bourne who would be Bond, “Jason Bourne” for the re-teaming of Matt Damon with his best Bourne director, Paul Greengrass.

It’s the most sinister Bourne movie yet, with a murderous CIA chief (Tommy Lee Jones) who will spare no expense,blackmail any tech tycoon and kill his own agents in his headlong pursuit of that righteous rogue agent, Jason Bourne, so he and his can “put him down.”

It’s the most breathless Greengrass (“United 93”, “Bloody Sunday”) movie yet, as he sets a new Olympic record for the Bourne blur of edits and handheld camera shots that create two hours of almost headache-inducing perpetual chase. It features the most humorless Tommy Lee Jones performance ever and a buff, stoic and less interesting Matt Damon turn that never seems to be about anything but a paycheck, Bourne again self-righteousness notwithstanding.

The only grace note allowed the cast is to give Julia Stiles, as that equally rogue online wizard and Bourne-handler Nicky Parsons, a noble and utterly convincing death — chest heaving from a sucking bullet wound, shock setting in. Hers is the only body in this body-strewn thriller we feel for, and no, it’s not a spoiler alert when she dies in the opening act.

Bourne has long been underground, off-the-grid, making a living in bareknuckle back alley brawls along the crisis-torn borders of Greece as “One Blow Bourne” — who fells foes with a single punch. Damn the simple laws of physics and relative throw-weights.

But Nicky has hacked back into the files of the “Treadstone” CIA program that created the super spy and has news about Bourne’s murky past. If only they can meet. If only her younger replacement (Alicia Vikander) hasn’t planted tracking malware into her hack, so that her boss (Jones) can find Bourne and finally “put him down.”

Riz Ahmed (“Nightcrawler”) is a tech tycoon who preaches “privacy is freedom” with his online service, but is compromised by the CIA.

And Vincent Cassel (“Mesrine”) is sharp if under-developed as a fanatical assassin the CIA folk only refer to as “The Asset” as they deploy him to kill Bourne, wherever (London, Berlin, Las Vegas, etc.) he may be, whatever the collateral damage.

Jones has hints of his “U.S. Marshals” guise in this CIA director, barking orders from a surveillance war room where he and his can seemingly see all, tap all, anticipate all and manipulate events to their liking. That stuff, with its “What do they know about us?” implications, is meant to be chilling.

“Split the town,” he orders his teams, closing in on Bourne and Parsons during a Greek riot. “Put her in a box.”

Greengrass puts us in that Athens-wide riot, a chaos of noise, chopper shots, unclear glimpses (rendered HD by CIA software), Molotov cocktails and mayhem.

The problem is, he won’t let go. That scene, like many in the movie, goes on forever. There are no pauses to recreate empathy, no real moments of connection. Over-editing tends to spoil the chases, starving us of the intensity created by anticipating this bit of jeopardy or that one. A lot was spent on digitally enhanced car crashing that is more an assault than a rush.

The monotonous, pulsing strings of the David Buckley version of John Powell’s score grate well before we get into the second hour.

And Vikander, a magnetic presence in “Ex Machina” and an empathetic one in “The Danish Girl” is absurdly young to be playing someone this high up the chain of command, entirely too lightweight to carry the cunning and gravitas her character is contrived to have. She looks and feels like a younger re-fluffing of Franka Potente’s heroine from the first Bourne movie, back in 2002.

The visceral visuals make this a barely-serviceable/watchable summer popcorn picture. But the bar was set high too long ago for that to be enough for America’s Bond. Everybody got paid, again, sure. When that’s your only motive, your high-minded action movie wilts under scrutiny, as if it was Bourne to be bad.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and brief strong language

Cast: Matt Damon, Alicia Vikander, Tommy Lee Jones, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles
Credits: Directed by Paul Greengrass, script by Paul Greengrass and Christopher Rouse, based on the Robert Ludlum character. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:03