A colleague reminded me of Ross Douthat’s review of The Bourne Ultimatum for the mag (you know he’s our movie reviewer, right?). An excerpt:

All of which makes Jason Bourne, the CIA-created death-dealer who’s back for more close-quarters mayhem in The Bourne Ultimatum, such a remarkable creation. He’s the first great left-wing action hero: James Bond for Nation readers, a John McClane that even Noam Chomsky can love.
This isn’t just because the Bourne movies’ politics are a farrago of CIA-bashing joined to post-9/11 paranoia. It’s because Bourne himself resolves the great contradiction bedeviling the liberal action movie–namely, how do you make your hero a killing machine (as any action hero needs to be) without making him politically incorrect and illiberal along the way? The ingenious solution is to make Bourne an unwilling killing machine, a man whose body is a weapon that his amnesia-ridden mind doesn’t understand, or even quite control. Bourne kills with fluid, crowd-pleasing ease, but it isn’t his fault: He was made that way.
Just before the latest Bourne installment hit theaters, the star and the director sparked a minor controversy by taking potshots at James Bond: Matt Damon called him “an imperialist” who “kills people and laughs and sips martinis and wisecracks about it,” while Paul Greengrass dismissed 007 as “an imperial adventurer of a particularly English sort” who “likes violence” and “has no guilt.” (Just in case we weren’t clear on the point, Greengrass added: “Personally, I spit on those values.”) They were obnoxious, but absolutely right: Jason Bourne (note those initials) is the anti-James Bond, and what makes the Bourne movies so remarkable is how successfully they invert the Bond formula, turning everything on its head but leaving the thrills intact. Indeed, the only action movie I’ve seen in the last twelve months that’s better than The Bourne Ultimatum is, well, Casino Royale.