In the nine years that followed The Bourne Supremacy, both Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass had maintained that they would love to come back and make a new Bourne movie, but the story had to be right, and, for almost a decade, that story apparently eluded the star and filmmaker. “To get back and look like this guy at age 45 was really a challenge”.
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Damon, who was nominated for an Academy Award earlier this year for his acting work on “The Martian”, did not appear in the fourth film of the franchise called Bourne Legacy which was why Jeremy Renner had to step in for him.
We spend much of the film between action sequences watching people either staring at computer screens or walking endlessly through corridors/tunnels/back streets/crowded plazas (There is so much walking in this movie that I believe I dropped three or four pounds just watching all that exercise).
Following a brief re-cap in which we witness David Webb volunteering for that special ops program, becoming Bourne, losing his memory, and then embarking on a one-man crusade as that memory returns, we are re-introduced to the man himself, and he cuts a forlorn figure.
And there are few more interesting actors that Vincent Cassel onscreen. ‘It really doesn’t help you in anything, but no, I don’t know if the playing the role made me any more paranoid.
‘Fake movie fighting isn’t actually a good skill to carry around in regular life, ‘ the actor laughs. Bourne is very much lost when we catch up with him in this chapter, and there’s a great dynamic explored between the hero and Heather Lee as she studies his files and begins to question if he can be “brought back in” (the question given weight thanks to strong performances from both Matt Damon and Alicia Vikander).
“I can probably count on my hands how many one-to-one scenes I’ve had with another woman throughout my entire career”, she said. Shut off the niggling voice in your brain that’s telling you “Bourne is the luckiest spy on earth”, luckier even than that english bloke on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and just go with it. The game has changed in the decade-plus since Bourne went off the grid: Technology trumps things that go boom, and shadow operatives kill with keystrokes rather than old-school tactical strikes. She’s one of those generational talents who just explodes on to the scene.
Vikander may now be a fixture on beauty magazine covers, but she was attracted to Heather Lee’s understated sexuality. But it turns out she was a fan of the franchise. “That won the day for us, thank God”. Paul Greengrass certainly does set up a couple of big blockbuster beats, including a car-smashing trip through Las Vegas and some Bourne vs. Asset battle in Athens, and they are outfitted with the director’s intense, albeit divisive, shaky cam style.
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“While I’m marching around with objective, they’re kind of narrating what it is I’m thinking as the story goes along”, Damon said.
