It has been almost ten years since Matt Damon last appeared in a Jason Bourne film. After insisting that The Bourne Ultimatum would be his final outing, the series was briefly handed off to Jeremy Renner for The Bourne Legacy—a detour that lasted about five minutes before Universal realized the mistake and threw a dump truck full of cash at Damon to bring him back. Four years later, the famed CIA assassin returns to uncover yet another important (and somehow previously overlooked) link to his past in the imaginatively titled Jason Bourne.
First, a warning: if you haven’t watched the previous Bourne films, you will probably feel lost. The writers assume you already know everything that happened before and make almost no effort to catch anyone up. Second, if you’re a fan of Honest Trailers, you might want to skip their Bourne video, because it unintentionally spoils most of this movie’s major beats.Ten years have passed since Bourne exposed Operation Blackbriar and vanished off the grid. He now spends his days in the shadier corners of Europe, punching people in the face for money in illegal fighting rings. Meanwhile, Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) resurfaces. She sneaks into a hacker collective, breaks into CIA servers, and uncovers evidence of a new black-ops program along with a personal connection to Bourne’s father.
After the government shuts down the hacker location and she destroys the equipment to cover her tracks, Nicky heads to Greece to find Bourne. The CIA’s new cyber-operations chief, Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), and CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) learn of the breach and immediately order a manhunt for both Parsons and Bourne.The core problem with the Bourne franchise at this point is simple: if you’ve seen one Bourne movie, you’ve essentially seen them all. Bourne fights to recover another buried piece of his past, exposes a secret CIA program, and takes down the bad guy of the week. That is the entire narrative template. Jason Bourne suffers from a severe lack of creativity.
A full decade later, the series plays it as safe as possible. There is no real attempt to inject anything fresh, even though other long-running franchises have successfully reinvented themselves in recent years. If you missed the signature shaky-cam action of the earlier films, you’re in luck—Earthquake Mode returns with a vengeance. Prepare to watch Matt Damon beat up waves of faceless minions while the camera operator appears to be having a full Parkinson’s episode for two hours straight.
As if the predictable plotting and nauseating visuals weren’t enough, the acting doesn’t elevate the material either. Alicia Vikander is badly miscast as Heather Lee, the head of CIA cyber operations. Not only does she look far too young for a high-level intelligence official, she never sells the authority or competence the role requires. Her character comes across as naive and poorly defined—you can never quite tell whether she genuinely wants to help Bourne or simply use him for her own advancement. Tommy Lee Jones, as Director Dewey, is tasked with being as villainous as possible, which mostly means doing his usual Tommy Lee Jones scowling routine.
The emotional core of the film is supposed to rest on these four central characters (Bourne, Nicky, Lee, and Dewey), yet nearly everyone involved feels like they are sleepwalking through a two-hour obligation rather than starring in a high-stakes thriller.
Jason Bourne does stage a handful of competent, high-paced action sequences—the Athens riot chase and the Las Vegas finale have energy—but that is the bare minimum you should expect from this franchise. The film suffers from an almost complete refusal to take risks. It follows the numbers so faithfully that it never generates real tension or surprise. If you are hoping Matt Damon’s natural charisma will paper over the weaknesses, don’t hold your breath. He is as stoic and physically committed as ever, but the script gives him almost nothing new to play.
This movie feels like a pure cash grab. It neither revitalizes the series nor leaves you eager for another installment. The producers couldn’t even be bothered to come up with an interesting title, and they appear to have put roughly the same amount of effort into the screenplay. Instead of promoting gun control, maybe Damon should have advocated for generic-writing control. After a ten-year absence, Jason Bourne returns with a thud and fails to live up to the standard set by its predecessors.
1/5
Society Reviews 
Leave a comment