Since we last met him Bourne has gone “off the grid” and is earning a living battering Eastern Europeans as a bare-knuckle fighter. The fifth installment in the popular spy-thriller franchise about an amnesiac Central Intelligence Agency assassin, Jason Bourne supposedly deals with such topical issues as cybersecurity and civil unrest, but the characters’ motivations for inflicting damage to people and property seem entirely personal.
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“In this movie Bourne comes out of the shadows to uncover some truth’s about the past”. “Jason Bourne” works to a certain extent, but it is far from the next big summer action movie or even a compelling story.
Several years after Bourne’s disappearance in The Bourne Ultimatum, he is discovered hiding out in Greece. I have really liked his portrayal of Jason Bourne with each film giving people more of an idea of his checkered past and who he really is.
Much has changed in 10 years, and director Paul Greengrass cuts to the chase from the get-go. This doesn’t go unnoticed at the Pentagon, where Tommy Lee Jones appears to have taken the Brian Cox role and Alicia Vikander is a younger Joan Allen. I couldn’t tell if she was American, British, Irish, etc. Tommy Lee Jones once again plays his character as the bored old man who really couldn’t care any less about what’s going on. It will easily top “The Bourne Legacy”, which debuted to $38 million in 2012. They started to say to me, the world’s changed, maybe we could do a new one, maybe that opens that possibility. Obviously, we can’t give a blanket answer that question, but we can offer a spoiler-free overview of what to expect and a not-to-be-taken-too-seriously age recommendation. With maybe two exceptions, the cast pulls from a list of minor offenses, like the darn word and other religious references.
Jason is still the fighting machine we remember; If anything he’s more calculated and fierce.
“We pretty quickly ruled out the sort of “Bourne finds happiness” route”, Greengrass cracked. He kinda swims away and he’s liberated from this identity.
It is a little bit of a mind boggle, with all the back and forth.
I hate to admit this, but there were moments in “Jason Bourne” where I was bored.
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“It’s a turbulent world”, he points out. The character may be part James Bond, part Ethan Hunt, but the Bourne franchise has felt the most plausible, offered exciting action set pieces and global tensions that feel achingly ripped-from-today’s-headlines. “It makes it feel edgy and it makes the franchise live”.
