K-SCORE: 45
Director: Paul Greengrass
Writers: Paul Greengrass, Christopher Rouse
Starring: Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel
Spoiler Level: Major
“trite cash-grab”
You know, I was looking for a reason to never watch another Bourne movie again. That Jeremy Renner one tried to get me there, but came up a little bit short. Then this one came along to really shove me in the back well over the line of: who gives a shit. Jason Bourne is far from the worst-made film I’ve seen recently or likely will see this year, yet I cannot come up with a single reason why anyone should watch it. I’m convinced it was made by a collection of people, none of whom actually wanted to write, direct, or star in another movie in this franchise. It completely rehashes the same story elements, characters, scenes, concepts, and style as all the other Bourne films, bringing absolutely nothing new to the table. In Hollywood’s age of remakes, I’ve actually come to look forward to sequels, having long since forgotten what an original entry even looks like. But Jason Bourne is compelling evidence for the argument that the only difference between a sequel and a remake is a sequel reuses wrinkly old actors and a remake replaces Patrick Stewart with James McAvoy, Keanu Reeves with a guy named Luke Bracey, and Leonard Nimoy with Leonard Nimoy. This is a trite cash-grab.
“circumventing gunfights so that he can win knife fights”
In The Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne is on a high-stakes quest to uncover his mysterious past, playing catch-up to the audience that assumed he was a professional assassin right from the start. Now Jason Bourne has regained his memories, read every file on every CIA program he was remotely affiliated with, killed or watched get killed every CIA dickhead responsible for such programs, won brawls and gunfights with dozens of other agency assassins called “assets,” and even needlessly gone to the very building where he was first indoctrinated. Those are the circumstances at the start of the film. That Jason Bourne spends the entire film continuing to “look for answers” and “learn the truth about his past” is, at this point, frankly ridiculous. In the first film and maybe the second, it was acceptable that the plotline featured him looking for details about his old life and trying to come to grips with what he had done, but at this point it’s not. He’s just a bitter, humorless, former CIA agent that’s better at hiding from security cameras, driving at high speeds through congested cities, scaling up and down buildings, countersniping, and circumventing gunfights so that he can win knife fights than anyone in the CIA. Thankfully it’s fun to watch someone who has those skills, even if he is a grump. The only evolution of Jason Bourne’s character is that he now says less than ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if Matt Damon had to read less dialogue for this movie than there are words in this review.
In Jason Bourne, you are again going to watch through a shaky handheld camera Bourne be chased and then chase down a different, vaguely foreign, CIA professional hitman who speaks very little and works alone. This one is played by Vincent Cassel, a French actor who has already played villain to Matt Damon’s hero in the Ocean movie franchise. Cassel’s character name in this film is literally Asset. Again Bourne’s going to beat the odds in a car chase and fight with him after a wreck, killing him in bloody melee combat. Again he’s going to track down a corrupt CIA policy maker, threaten to execute him in a dimly lit suite of a hotel, and then watch as he’s killed by some other means. Again his movements are going to be poorly tracked by a thirty-something female CIA agent who micromanages teams alpha and bravo. Again he’s going to look through a box filled with passports from various nations with his alternate identities, cash, and a gun. Again he’s going to extract computer files on top secret CIA programs with insidious sounding codenames - Operation: Ironhand will be added to a list that includes Operation: Treadstone and Operation: Blackbriar. Again Bourne is going to fall from the fifth or sixth floor of a building and have to get up quite injured so as to evade capture from other incoming CIA assets. Again the only person Jason Bourne cares about, a young and pretty girl, is going to get shot with a sniper rifle and killed while she’s riding in the passenger seat of a vehicle he’s driving at high speeds out of a foreign city.
It’s this last plot point that bothers me most. Not only have I seen this in Bourne’s story before, and not only is the poignancy of the tragedy of Nicki’s death not addressed by Bourne or the other characters, and not only is it never made clear what compelled her to take risks using her hacking skills to steal current information on CIA black ops programs, but it fundamentally makes the film and series less interesting. Nicki Parsons is the only non-Bourne character that spans the entire franchise, and, unlike Bourne, her role changes over the course of the trilogy. She goes from an analyst just doing her job in the first one to a person Bourne tracks down in the second one because of the fact that she’s one of the few people alive and around from the era when his original black ops program ran, to an ally who alludes to a personal past with Bourne in the third film. All the while Jason Bourne is running around asking, “Who am I? Am I an assassin? I don’t know who I am?!” and the latest model pencil-pusher is whispering “take out both targets” into a headset. So killing her off is the easy choice. It’s harder to write the film where she continues to live and has to actually interact with Bourne, maybe encourage him to speak occasionally, force him into some character development that clearly the franchise-grinding producers do not want. Instead she can just use her dying breath to literally throw exposition via USB drive at Bourne and he can continue to scrape the bottom of the barrel for details about his past.
Just looked it up: Jason Bourne says 288 words in the film. My review up to this point is 1054.
Whoa! Never mind, that’s the girl from Ex Machina. Interesting career choice for her. Now I see, Bourne must have spent the entire film looking for evidence that’s she’s not a real person. Just look at the way she interacts with humans, Jason. A while ago I watched her select which skin she wants to wear around with exactly the same level of deadened emotional response she exhibited while tracking your movements. She’s a goddamn android. Coming soon: The Bourne Runner Machina. The year is 2019, and David Webb has adopted one of his many aliases, Rick Deckard, and taken a job as an LA cop who assassinates replicants.
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What do you mean they’re already doing that?
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Well, is it a sequel or a remake?
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Both? That was my idea!
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Ryan Gosling!?