In ‘Jason Bourne,’ a digital dragnet tightens

Jason Bourne, as played by Matt Damon across four movies, is forever disappearing off the grid only to reluctantly resurface years later and again menace the CIA. He’s the spy who came in from the cold only to return to the cold, come in again, and, yet again, head back to the cold.

In the chilly and bleak “Jason Bourne,” the amnesia-ridden assassin has been resurrected again, along with director Paul Greengrass, with whom Damon returns to the franchise after a nineyear break. Bourne is still brooding. Greengrass’ handheld camera is still frenetic. And the saga’s lethal precision is still sharp.

The spy game, already far from a martini-sipping affair in previous installments, is resolutely grim in “Jason Bourne.” The superspy, now a hulking mass of bullet-scarred muscle, is spending his days torturing himself in bare-knuckle brawls, haunted by his past. In shattering set pieces and terse emotion-less dialogue, any remaining sunlight has been drained away. The amount of people brazenly killed by Vincent Casell, the “asset” in Bourne’s pursuit, may well outnumber the words spoken by Bourne in the entire film.

Though first conceived in 1980 by Robert Ludlum, Bourne is perhaps the ultimate post9/ 11 hero. Especially in the hands of Greengrass (who also employed his gritty realism in the Sept. 11 drama “Flight 93”), Bourne is a wrecking ball of accountability for America’s clandestine past. He’s part fantasy (his preternatural control of out-of-control events is reassuring) and part real- ity (American disillusionment made visceral).

In “Jason Bourne,” the digital dragnet is tightening around Bourne. The film is self-consciously set in a post-Snowden world; the CIA is hacked by Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles, whose smarts have given all of these films a kick), who’s threatening to reveal the covert Treadstone operation.

The film, penned by Greengrass and Christopher Rouse (editor of this and previous “Bourne” films), introduces a tech magnate (Riz Ahmed) whose celebrated social-networking platform is secretly feeding information to CIA director Robert Dewey

UNIVERSAL PICTURES PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action and brief strong language. 2 hours, 3 minutes. Matt Damon appears in a scene from “Jason Bourne.”