Jason Bourne offered a gritty alternative to decades of slick spy movies. “I’m really excited to see what she does next”, he said. In fact the two main action set pieces in Jason Bourne are both jaw-dropping works of high tension.
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The film opens with Bourne’s old co-worker and flame Nicky (Julia Stiles) hacking into a CIA database in order to make public the agency’s skeletons on a WikiLeaks-style website run by a Julian Assange stand-in (Vinzenz Kiefer).
My feelings on the title matches my feelings for this movie; the title Jason Bourne gets me excited knowing that there’s another Jason Bourne adventure out there, but the title also feels uninspired and like they’re running out of ideas.
“Even when Jason Bourne doesn’t click with the same rhythm as its predecessors, it has a weight that outclasses almost every other big action movie around”.
Which is not to say that the film isn’t any good; it’s just not up to the level that we were hoping for when we heard that Damon was returning to the franchise, replacing Jeremy Renner who also turned in a by-the-numbers performance that made “The Bourne Legacy” into a disappointment.
With previous writer Gilroy (who wrote all four previous films and directed Legacy) absent, there’s a weird “mad libs” feeling to Jason Bourne, as if screenwriters Greengrass and Christopher Rouse were less concerned with constructing an effective continuation of the storyline as they were with crossing beats off a checklist. It got interesting when I thought that if the character has reached a tipping point, we’re going to put him in a world that’s reached a tipping point. And busy action scenes do not get much busier than a auto chase down the Las Vegas strip; thankfully, SWAT vehicles are seemingly indestructible.
From there, however, they had to go somewhere with Bourne that wasn’t about regaining his memory as in the earlier films. You couldn’t have him suddenly say ‘Oh, actually, there’s a bit more I didn’t remember before’.
Behind “Jason Bourne”, STX Entertainment’s “Bad Moms” entered the weekend at No. 2. He kinda swims away and he’s liberated from this identity.
Greengrass’ own soul seems perpetually divided between making slam-bang action rides and keeping the setting relevant and realistic in a rapidly changing world.
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Bourne is living in Athens, Greece. To learn more about Jason Bourne head over to this website.
