Movie review: Jason Bourne, again

By Jay Stone

“I remember,” says Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), at the start of the new Jason Bourne movie Jason Bourne. “I remember everything.” Well, he’s certainly not likely to forget his name, given that sentence.

Anyway, the amnesia is gone, and with it Bourne’s sense of existential angst and also, frankly, most of what’s interesting. Jason Bourne is the fourth movie in the series (we’re not counting The Bourne Legacy, the attempt to insinuate Jeremy Renner into this confusion of identities, loyalties and fights) and it apparently begins a whole new chapter in the Bourne canon. Jason Bourne, the man who once had to learn who he was, has become Jason Bourne, franchise.

The first three movies, based on Robert Ludlum’s novels, were about a man who was trained by the CIA to be an assassin and a spy. He is relentlessly hunted by his former bosses when he tries to uncover their perfidy and discover his own humanity.

This time, with the aid of multiple flashbacks, Bourne is learning the truth about his father, also a CIA operative and apparently the man who designed this mission of killing and beatings. The CIA, meanwhile, seems to be doing very little but hunting Bourne from one end of the world to the other — the movie travels to Greece, Rome, Iceland, London, Berlin and Las Vegas. It’s not for nothing that Bourne shares initials with James Bond — using high-tech equipment, spy satellites, teams of operatives and a ruthless killer called only The Asset (Vincent Cassel). Hey guys: who’s fighting the terrorists?

The Bourne movies were notable for their realism: one man improvising his way around electronic surveillance and surviving by his wits. Director Paul Greengrass, who did the second two films, is back with his signature busy hand-held camera — Jason Bourne may give you a bit of mal de mer, if not downright vertigo — but the stage has become much larger. There are long car chases, preposterous crashes, many explosions, and drawn-out fight scenes: Jason Bourne has entered the universe of Mission: Impossible films in which movies find their value in expensive-looking action sequences.

All in all, it’s like watching a two-hour trailer for a Jason Bourne movie, not that there aren’t a few pleasure to be had. Damon still has the energy (and the biceps) to carry off the role, and his maturity — the actor is 45 — adds a note of world-weary experience. The film opens with Bourne scratching out a living in bare-knuckle fights on the Greek-Albanian border, apparently a hotbed of off-the-books betting, and when Damon takes his shirt off, we see that the character hasn’t lost a step.

Meanwhile, his old colleague Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) has hacked the CIA computer (from a “hacking camp” in Reykjavik) and discovered that Bourne’s father was more than he seemed. The hack is discovered by the corrupt new CIA director Robert Dewey — the corrupt old CIA director having been dispatched in a previous episode — and he begins barking out orders to bring Bourne in before something bad happens.

What this might be never spelled out exactly, and in fact lots of bad things happen in the trying. However, Dewey is played by Tommy Lee Jones, the foremost barker of orders in all of Hollywood, so we go along. Jones has become alarmingly wrinkled — he looks like he needs a good ironing-out — but as grimly feisty as ever. “Jason Bourne is in play,” he says to the Asset, words that get him so excited he summarily murders the man he’s been torturing to death and gets on the next plane.

Slightly less easy to read is Heather Lee (the omnipresent Alicia Vikander), Dewey’s assistant, who seems to have a soft spot for Bourne because he is, after all, only trying to find out about his father, and also maybe because he’s pretty cute.

Soon the game’s afoot. Bourne goes through his passport collection, sneaks into and out of lots of industrial buildings where he alters electrical systems, and manages to stay a step ahead of the world’s intelligence community. Greengrass, who co-wrote the film with Christopher Rouse, throws in some modern-sounding references to Edward Snowden and the privacy issues surrounding social media, but we’re not fooled. Jason Bourne is the series boiled down to its essence: corporate America being outsmarted by a pug-nosed all-American. He remembers everything except when to stop.

– 30 –