I don’t want to spoil too much here, but I’ll tell you the plot line is eerily similar to, well, just about every other Matt Damon Bourne movie.
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Tantalizingly, the film opens with the rogue agent saying, “I remember everything”. In a summer full of narratives about how franchise sequels and reboots are underperforming, Jason Bourne is easily the most successful franchise continuation of the bunch.
As much as I love action movies, I can’t help but feel an enormous swell of pity when some poor soul gets swept up into a string of too many sequels.
That superhuman surveillance ability makes the central crisis in this exhausted sequel seem all the more ridiculous. There are nods to Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks-type intrigue, but never enough to build any real sense of doom. The Bourne franchise found closure in 2007, and I can’t help feeling Damon knows it.
This time, Treadstone’s former logistics technician Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) comes to Bourne’s aid after she uncovers the shocking truth behind the “black-ops” program that turned Jason aka David Webb into CIA’s prime, one-man killing machine. It has a decent cast, a great deal of overall action, and it takes audiences back to the fast-paced world of espionage that pits Jason Bourne against the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, Star Trek Beyond struggled during its second weekend, dropping to #2 with an estimated $24 million.
The majority of the movie follows a conflict between the Central Intelligence Agency director (Tommy Lee Jones, eternally bored of all his roles) and a social media guru who no longer wants to sell users’ information to the government.
The screenplay by Greengrass and Christopher Rouse (the editor on all the “Bourne” films) makes some stabs at political relevance.
“All those people who have come up to me over the years, hopefully they’re representative of a whole group of people who will go buy tickets”, says Damon. But Jason Bourne takes those kinds of sequences to the next level – especially a scene in Las Vegas.
Jason Bourne, costing $120 million to produce, reunites Damon with director Paul Greengrass, who helmed The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum. One character worth mentioning as a new asset is Vincent Cassel, who does a fine job but I was wondering one thing while watching his character – why not give him a backstory or even some dialogue? It is perhaps telling that there’s no trace of that film in Jason Bourne.
Jason Bourne, the fourth film in the Bourne franchise starring Matt Damon, is debuting in theaters this weekend to mixed reviews.
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Amusingly, the HT team nearly completely ignores the Jeremy Renner led movie, The Bourne Legacy.
