The Bourne Legacy

Skippable, and the most interesting failure in the series. Damon and Greengrass both declined to return, so Tony Gilroy, who had written the first three, built a film around a different agent in a different programme whose events happen at the same time as Ultimatum. News of Bourne's exposure in New York reaches these characters as a crisis on a screen, and the agency's response is to shut down everything adjacent to it, which is how the plot starts.

That premise is genuinely clever and it is also the reason the film does not work. Its protagonist spends the first hour reacting to somebody else's story. Aaron Cross is in Alaska when the decision to kill him is taken for reasons he has no part in and never learns, and a thriller where the hero cannot affect the cause of his own problem has a hole in the middle of it.

What it gets right is the dependency. Cross is on two kinds of pill that hold his enhancements in place, and the film is at its best as a drug story: a man who will lose his mind if he cannot resupply, dragging a virologist across the world to fix him. Rachel Weisz is excellent, and the long sequence in the laboratory where a colleague walks in and starts shooting is the one piece of real dread in the five films.

Watch it directly after Ultimatum or not at all. The overlap is the only thing holding it in place, and a year's distance makes it unreadable. It ends with its plot unresolved and a sequel that was never made, and nothing in Jason Bourne acknowledges that any of it happened.