Are you getting enough action?

Question: What's the similarity between the Hollywood action movie and 'The Terminator'? Answer: No sooner have you written them off for dead than they come roaring back to life.

Until recently, the action movie looked to be on its last legs. A series of high-profile flops - 'A Sound of Thunder', 'Stealth', 'Miami Vice' - convinced industry-watchers that audiences had tired of this well-worn genre. Then, along comes 'The Bourne Ultimatum'.

The third in the Bourne series, this action flick chalked up the best August opening on record in the US, taking more than $70 million in its first three days. Not only has Jason Bourne outdone James Bond in its opening weekend - but it is better than the previous two installments. The action movie, it seems, is still alive and kicking. Some will ascribe the extraordinary success of 'The Bourne Ultimatum' to British director, Paul Greengrass. He neatly serves up the usual smorgasbord of shoot outs, martial arts and car chases - with a side salad of liberal guilt.

Greengrass cut his teeth on 'World in Action' in the 1980s and in 'The Bourne Ultimatum,' he flags up issues that might well have absorbed him back then, such as state-sanctioned murder, "extraordinary rendition" and the CIA's "black ops" unit. In this way, he makes an otherwise run-of-the-mill action picture acceptable to those opposed to Britain and America's military presence in Iraq.

In Greengrass's hands, Jason Bourne becomes a kind of left-wing Rambo. Yet, I suspect the film's box office success is much more fundamental than this.

For contemporary audiences, particularly in America, there's something profoundly reassuring about an Anglo-Saxon hero who is capable of single-handedly taking on and defeating a sinister, clandestine organization bent on the destruction of our democratic way of life. The renegade CIA operatives in Jason Bourne's sights may not be Islamic Jihadists, but they are terrorists all the same.

Beneath 'The Bourne Ultimatum's patina of liberalism is a conventional Hollywood action movie in which the hero uses any means necessary to protect our hard-won freedoms.

In other words, Greengrass's anti-Americanism is just a clever way of masking the right-wing vigilantism that has always been at the heart of the genre. By making the villains a group of intelligence agents who have no regard for legal niceties, he gives Jason Bourne all the license he needs to suspend due process in bringing them to justice.

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