On the first day of shooting Jason Bourne, Matt Damon pulled off his shirt for a bare-knuckled fight scene to reveal an impressively sculpted body. Fans of the franchise will check out “Jason Bourne” as long as it’s not supposed to be a total turkey, and the return of director Paul Greengrass has many fans excited. Following the third film, Damon said he was through with the role, stating that they had taken the character as far as they could. I didn’t love “The Bourne Legacy” with Jeremy Renner, but I also didn’t hate it by any means.
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“Bourne’s” storyline doesn’t have near the same level of attention to detail, as Damon’s character was put through pretty much everything he could have gone through in the original “Bourne” trilogy and continues to tread familiar ground.
Universal’s Jason Bourne, the fifth installment in the spy-thriller series, opened nationwide Friday and is now on track for a $57M opening weekend. Then series veteran and former Central Intelligence Agency operative Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) knocks on a clandestine door in Reykjavik, Iceland, intent on researching Bourne’s past.
Alicia Vikander boards the Bourne franchise as Heather Lee, an expert on cyber security at the Central Intelligence Agency. She dispatches a hit man, code name Asset (Vincent Cassel), to neutralise the targets.
The film begins with Bourne making his living in the Albanian border country, making a living as an itinerant fighter, traveling from one refugee camp to the next and suffering from flashbacks of all the people he’d killed while working for the American government. A propulsive momentum keeps the wheels moving as the action hops from Greece to Berlin to London to Vegas. The cities of Athens and Rome are also featured but those sequences were filmed primarily in the versatile Canary Islands.
The thriller was directed by Paul Greengrass and written by Greengrass and its editor, Christopher Rouse. Unfortunately, some of those sequences looks very familiar and often go on for extended periods. The idea here is for us to find out more about Bourne’s past, as he does throughout the movie. “Beep beep! I gotta get to Ben’s house!” The movie does feature some intense action scenes.
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And, now, Damon is stepping back in (not sure where that leaves Agent Cross). It’s not that fresh anymore. It’s not a awful movie and Bourne fans will definitely enjoy a lot of the movie, but when it’s compared to the three far superior films in the franchise, it’s a letdown.
