In its own muddle-headed way it proceeds along the lines that if something can go wrong, well heck, it will go wrong.

I don’t think this is right at all. It was a deeply paranoid film centring on the abuse of technology – my son also wondered if it would damage the sales of iPhones, which (or something very like them) are used to great effect by the head bomber. Things went wrong because the bombers went to great and ingenious lengths to make them go wrong – it was like the Italian Job with terrorists. And because there was a plentiful supply of recruits and sympathisers for an anti-American cause – a point most of the Americans were shown as completely failing to understand (that was the significance of the exchange with the more ‘enlightened’ anchor).

any cost to save the US President was worth it, up to and including the wholesale trashing of Salamanca (and its people) itself

There was something like that in there – POTUS was almost a talisman by the end of it – but I don’t know about the trashing; almost all the death and destruction we saw was caused by the bombers.

although it attempts to emulate the grit of the Bourne movies, it doesn’t quite get there. It is dirty, grubby, dusty and the aftermath of a bomb blast is well handled in all its gruesome detail, but there is a continual sense that this is a patina thrown across the characters and scenery to serve a greater purpose rather than the organic outcome of the events on screen.

The Bourne parallel is interesting. The demolition-derby destructiveness of the car chase sequences was a nod to the Moscoe car chase in one of the Bourne films, but really they were nothing like it – nowhere near as brutal and relentless. I was more struck by the lingering, unhurried shots of the aftermath of the main bombing, with the different protagonists sitting up, looking round and obviously thinking What was that? And what the hell do I do now? If the Bourne films redefine heroism by making it look really difficult and really dangerous, this film was more about heroism and post-traumatic stress.

Politically it’s no great shakes – there is a good President of the USA who must be defended, and there are evil Muslim terrorists who must be defeated. (At the risk of sounding like Nick Cohen, I was genuinely surprised that the terrorists didn’t turn out to be some kind of CIA/Mossad front group; that’s a very available storyline on dramatic grounds alone.) What I think was interesting was the way it tapped into fears around surveillance and propaganda: on one hand, everything was recorded (lots of vital pieces of evidence caught on camera); on the other, nothing got out without official filtering (the last line of the film closed the official book on the story, suggesting that most people would never know what had happened). That, and the suggestion that the danger was not the terrorists’ cause but their determination to fight – a mood shared by people advising the President – complicated the picture in some interesting ways.