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It’s not often that nearly 2,000 people burst into spontaneous applause at the sight of four men being brutally pulverised on the backstairs of Waterloo station. But such was the euphoria created by a recent West End screening of Paul Greengrass’s shamelessly propulsive The Bourne Ultimatum that those gathered, all well-heeled culturati, could not help but whoop loudly with delight when the first-act pursuit of the action-man protagonist Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) culminated in an unforgettably visceral bout of five-way fisticuffs in the bowels of the station.

The movie, the rightful and triumphant conclusion to the Bourne trilogy (Identity, Supremacy, Ultimatum), has Bourne back in the saddle and in hot pursuit of his former CIA paymasters. As usual the question for the amnesiac hero is still the urgent, and yet touchingly philosophical, “Who am I?” And this time he gets some conclusive answers, faces off against the agency supremo Scott Glenn, and dispatches an entire army of crack assassins using only the most ingenious methods – you haven’t lived until you’ve seen him take a crack Moroccan hitman down with a well-placed thwack of a hardback book.

Bourne, however, isn’t the only screen hero who seems to be gratifying deep-seated audience desires for bone-crushing antics. The return of Bruce Willis’s trigger-happy flatfoot John McClane, complete with mano-a-mano combat and car crash chaos, has transformed Die Hard 4 into a $300 million summer box-office smash. Before that Casino Royale became the most talked-about action movie of last year mostly because of its hard-hitting action scenes. Soon to arrive in multiplexes are the Clive Owen film Shoot ‘Em Up, Jamie Foxx’s thriller The Kingdom, and the latest bullet-ridden trials of Sylvester Stallone in Rambo IV.

The action movie is back, and grittier than ever. But why did a genre that seemed content to depict the computer-generated escapades of men in spandex suddenly reach for the knuckle-dusters?

You can thank Bourne for a start, says the Hollywood producer Frank Marshall. The blockbusting mogul, who counts Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Sixth Senseamong his credits, and who is also a producer on the Bourne franchise, says that everything changed during the first cinematic outing for Robert Ludlum’s amnesiac superspy in The Bourne Identity. “We were trying to make an antiaction movie,” explains Marshall. “Every time someone suggested doing something that was standard in the action world, we said that we had to do the exact opposite. And that acted like a shot in the arm of the action genre.”

True, when The Bourne Identity was released in 2002 its backstreet European locations and rough hand-held shooting style made it quite different in a mainstream movie world defined by the clear and clean special-effects adventures of Star Wars, Spider-Man, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Here Bourne’s ability to defend himself against ruthless assassins by using kitchen knives, rolled-up magazines and lamp flexes seemed especially compelling when compared with Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in the same year’s Die Another Day, who hit an action-movie nadir by riding down a computer-generated tsunami on a makeshift surfboard.

Marshall says that Bond’s reinvention in the far grittier Casino Royale is the result of Bourne’s success. “ Bourne has pumped up the action genre and inspired people into new ideas and new stories,” he says. “And certainly in Casino Royale there’s a tonal shift there, and well, we take that as flattery.”

Surely it isn’t just the brilliance of Bourne that has nurtured the reinvention of action? There is, after all, a social component to movie-watching, too. The current cycle of modern action flicks began in the mid-Eighties with the emergence of blockbuster stars such as Stallone and Schwarzenegger. They churned out Rambo, Predator and Commando, they shot hundreds of people, and they spoke of conservative Reaganite politics.

They were movies made in reaction to permissive 1970s values, and disillusionment with the likes of Watergate and Vietnam. The movies were about men who didn’t make mistakes and who kicked ass for Uncle Sam. By the Nineties, however, the New Man appeared, and audiences demanded more angst in their heroes. Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise became the Clinton-era action men (in The Matrix and Mission Impossible, respectively), while Stallone and Schwarzenegger drifted into humiliating self-parody.

It’s no surprise then, according to the Die Hard screenwriter Steven E. de Souza, that in the morally slippery world of George W. Bush, the resurgence of old-school action has coincided with a similar return to old-time action values. “Audiences are psychologically back in a place where they were in the 1980s,” he recently told Newsday magazine. “There’s a distrust of authority . . . So we have to roll up our sleeves, and the individual hero has to kick in.” This is most explicitly seen in Jason Bourne, who has spent three movies battling with his CIA bosses but whose own rough justice is terrifyingly autocratic – he is judge, jury, and gleeful executioner.

There is a possibility that we’re overreading the action movie. The revitalised genre could merely be a product of natural movie cycles. Marshall, for one, thinks so. He says that today’s action movies are simply a response to a market saturated in comic-book movies and safe fantasy violence (see Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and so on). He says, also, that Bourne and Co, just like their predecessors, will have a limited shelf life, and we’ll no doubt reach a point where we’ve had enough of shaky cameras, broken knuckles and gritty street action. And this point will come, when?

“I’m not sure,” says Marshall, carefully ambiguous. “As long as the movies are story-driven, combined with incredible action, then maybe they’ll have a long shelf life. With Bond there was over 20 of them before they started to get old!” Wow. Twenty Bourne movies? Now that, finally, would be something to cheer.

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