Always at the cutting edge, I finally caught one of early summer's hit movies and Bill O'Reilly's midsummer whipping boy, The Bourne Ultimatum.

From his skills to his globehopping and down to his initials, Jason Bourne is the latest variation on the James Bond archetype, but every new Bond must be attuned in different ways to his times-- and the way Bourne fulfills audience action hero requirements for the post-9/11 era says something about how many of us view the situation we're in.

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On a technical level, certainly, the film is masterfully well crafted. Director Paul Greengrass-- who also did The Bourne Supremacy, United 93, and the excellent northern Ireland film Bloody Sunday-- is the thinking man's Michael Bay. Like Bay he edits his films into such tiny pieces that everything registers as pure sensation; unlike with Bay, however, the result isn't like getting pummeled by a pellet gun, but like watching a haystack emerge out of little blobs of color as Monet paints in real time.

The conventions of the action thriller are so familiar that Greengrass can give us the merest hint of a common scene-- an assassin planting a bomb, which turns out to be a decoy and the real bomb is-- and we put the scene together in our heads after it happens from the pieces, and understand everything without a word. It proves to be a perfect stylistic match for the character of Jason Bourne, instinctive spy, who takes in the world around as a series of flashes as he spots others using the same training he had and always makes the right next move to stay one step ahead of them. (Admittedly, sometimes this gets too far ahead of itself; there's one scene where, so far as I could tell, Bourne dematerialized and rematerialized in his adversary's office.)

Greengrass and his screenwriters (primarily Tony Gilroy, director of the upcoming Michael Clayton) are less successful at coming up with something new for Bourne to do, virtually remaking The Bourne Supremacy and even inducing a sense of deja vu in the casting (with Chris Cooper and Brian Cox having been cast as indie-movie-cred bad guys in the previous ones, David Straithairn could not be far behind, and Michael Gambon can surely expect a call for the next sequel after Cox and Albert Finney).

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What Bourne is about is the Bond formula turned inward: the evil plot he's up against was not Dr. No's missile threat but the fact of Bourne's own training, and in each movie he fights back against his own former bosses in the CIA, essentially finding and punishing the latest in a series of bad dads who wounded his inner child by training him to be a stone cold killer. Like the child of a large-living alcoholic, Bourne just wants the simple pleasures of domesticity, fidelity and home for dinner, but it always gets spoiled-- the CIA seems to devote most of its resources to the hopeless task of killing Bourne just to "tie things off."

And so he has to go find the latest bad Dad and tell him off-- and because Bourne doesn't want to be a super-killer any more, once he actually finds these fat middle-aged guys, that's all he really does. He can't fight them-- he'd make mincemeat of them in two seconds-- and he won't kill them. As in a Production Code movie or The Lion King, he has to maneuver them into a position where they force justice upon themselves.

So Bourne is Bond for Chomsky readers and the emo era: the evil is in America's soul, your mission if you choose to accept it is to tell the evil grownups off for all the bad things America has done, and nurse your tender, damaged self. The result is a series which, for all its globehopping (and Greengrass is superb at depicting a Europe which seems to consist solely of Norman Foster glass-and-steel structures and public transport), is almost pathologically uninterested in any other actual country.

Since Franka Potente's girlfriend in the first movie, there virtually hasn't been a speaking character in the series who wasn't an American employee of the CIA. (There's a Guardian reporter in this movie, but he's purely a prop.) Of course, all James Bond ever did was talk to the maitre'ds and bang the beautiful babes of each nation he visited, but at least there was the pretence of interest in local allies or adversaries; even the intelligence services of other countries aren't represented here, Bourne is completely oblivious to the places he goes and so are the guys trying to kill him. Chasing Bourne is a unilateral American operation.

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The movie starts to fall apart in a way the last one didn't when Greengrass et al. begin to make explicit allusions to the post-9/11 era. Bourne's flashbacks begin to include scenes of waterboarding and hooded figures a la Abu Ghraib; he goes to a middle-eastern country (Morocco) for the first time; one of the cities he races through is Madrid, and we see him at Atocha train station, site of the Madrid bombing. Straithairn's character talks about now having more freedom to order killings, in a way that can't help but recall Clinton-era legalistic reluctance to kill Osama Bin Laden (at which point many of us, surely, do not share the film's blanket horror of assassination per se). Finally Bourne comes to New York-- and the movie's establishing shots avert their eyes from the south end, where even this movie would be forced to acknowledge the absence of the World Trade Center.

Bourne's inversion of secret agent work into a purely personal brand of therapy worked as long as we were far from that reality. But the worldview underlying the Bourne movies-- that there are no real bad guys in the world, only the CIA and America committing assassinations (outlawed long ago, of course, but everyday agency business in these movies)-- falls apart as soon as you introduce the slightest sense that the CIA might have a real mission in the world beyond killing its own ex-employees on a regular basis. A single Chinese agent, a single ex-KGB type peddling nukes, a single Islamic terror cell would puncture the bubble of America-centrism that these movies exist in and make their solipsistic focus on the evil done to Bourne start to seem absurd.

In a world with real bad guys, we need men like Jason Bourne (though brainwashing and all that is not how we actually get them) who aren't afraid to do harsh, vicious things against vicious, but very real, threats. We need agencies like the CIA, generally not to go around killing people but to gain knowledge and insight into these threats and help us stop them. But clearly there's a section of the public that still doesn't think that-- that thinks we have nothing to fear, but we should fear ourselves-- and responds to the Bourne movies' silly and dangerous fantasy that the only evil is within.

After I said some of these things on a movie board, another poster there had a brilliant suggestion for a fourth Bourne movie. There's a real plot against America, and the CIA comes looking for Bourne-- not to "tie him off," but to ask him to help. To use his training and skill to save American lives and defend democracy. And so Bourne would really have to wrestle with the question-- for all that what they did to him was ugly and sordid, doesn't what they made him in fact have its uses in today's world? Wasn't it, in some real way, justified?

Call it The Bourne Reactivation.