Jason Bourne
After attempting to move the franchise in a different direction with “The Bourne Legacy” (starring Jeremy Renner as another assassin figuring out his past), Universal have turned back to Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass (who directed “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum”) to juice back up the series with the original character. It seems like a fool-proof plan, as it was Greengrass’s films that made the series essential viewing by kicking the tires underneath the action sequences and giving us a strong emotional and political investment in Bourne’s struggles to piece together his past. The results are mixed, at best. Like the most recent Bond film, “Spectre,” it feels like an afterthought rather than a compelling reason to follow the character into the fray once more.
The film begins with Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), the data analyst from the first film who started with the CIA before helping Bourne herself, in Iceland at a hacker locale as she digs into the CIA’s systems for all their information on their Black Ops programs, starting with the Treadstone program that Jason (whose real name is David Webb) was a part of and going to their most recent one. She rendezvous with Bourne in Greece, where he is doing bare knuckle fighting, and brings him the information before her and a shadowy character named Christian Dassault (think Julian Assange) release it online. The reason? She’s found information about Jason’s father, who died in front of his son before David/Jason entered the Treadstone program. Unfortunately for them both, the CIA, headed by Dir. Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) and an analyst named Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) have traced Nicky’s hack, and followed her to Greece, as well as enlisted a field asset (played by Vincent Cassell) to take them out. That’s where the action starts proper, and when Nicky is killed, Jason is sent on the run to look for the truth, all while having Dewey on his trail.
The film begins like gangbusters with the sequence where Nicky and Jason meet up in Greece. Set within a riot in the streets between protesters and the police, it feels like a situation for action and astute geopolitical intrigue tailor made for Greengrass’s talents. Unfortunately, that protest doesn’t amount to much but a volatile setting, because with the exception of the film’s look at online security and the tension between absolute encryption for users vs. the government’s need to track people (which then gets boiled down to something like the recent Apple vs. Justice Department fight earlier this year), there isn’t much of a real world inspiration for what we’re watching. Working apart from Robert Ludlum’s own writing, Greengrass and co-writer Christopher Rouse (a longtime editor for the series) have some intriguing parts for a film worthy of succeeding “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” (not to mention a game Matt Damon, great in reprising the role), but we just don’t feel much tension in what we’re watching, especially in our 3rd or 4th chase scene in Las Vegas at the end. Apart from Damon, the only actor making me care about what we’re seeing here in Vikander as Heather Lee, who feels like more than just another Nicky Parsons. The very ends sets up a fifth Damon-led Bourne film that could hold my interest, but even that feels undercut in the end. I’ll be curious to see what happens from here. That doesn’t mean I’ll be curious enough to sit through it.
