Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The Bourne series of movies might be the greatest triumph of the ADHD era of entertainment, where attention spans are short, and everything in the moment is either the best or the worst. After a decently successful first film directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), the franchise reins were handed to Paul Greengrass, whose The Bourne Supremacy in 2004 and The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007 were huge successes and among the best-reviewed films of their respective years. Ultimatum even won three Oscars! In the immediate pre-Marvel era, they were the pinnacle of Hollywood action filmmaking.
And sure, you couldn’t remember plot specifics from movie to movie. Jason Bourne was … some kind of supersoldier, right? Whose … memory was erased? And he keeps haunting the CIA like some kind of krav-maga-fighting poltergeist? And Treadstone! Treadstone is a word from those movies! And then Joan Allen shows up, except honestly who can remember if she’s the antagonist or not. Honestly the things I remember most clearly from all four previous Bourne films (including 2012’s The Bourne Legacy that tried to reboot the series with Jeremy Renner) are Franka Potente getting killed at one point, and Elizabeth Marvel turning into a stone-cold assassin for one scene in Legacy. But I never need to remember these movies! I just need to enjoy them in the moment.
Which is a big part of the reason why Jason Bourne is such a disappointing final (?) chapter to the Bourne cinematic saga. With Greengrass back in the director’s chair after handing over the reins for Legacy, he steps back in and has delivered a movie that is sluggish, dour, and not even particularly interested in its own mythology while we’re in the movie. The franchise continues to attract some great actors; here we get Oscar winners Alicia Vikander and Tommy Lee Jones. But while they’re both good actors, they’re both so downbeat, and with this being the 5th film in the franchise, it’s impossible not to read, say, Jones’s world-weariness as a kind of commentary on franchise fatigue. Recently-minted Emmy-winner Riz Ahmed is also onboard as a Mark Zuckerberg-esque figure whose information-gathering platforms have become caught up in the Treadstone mishegas. And since this is an international crime story that hops across Europe, the law states that Vincent Cassel must be cast as well, and he is his Vincent Cassel-iest.
The plot — kicked off by an appearance by recurring actress Julia Stiles, who is, let’s say, not exactly delivering her most committed performance — is as inconsequential as ever, though this time it has something to do with Jason’s father, which only served to remind me of how the last few Bond movies spent a depressing amount of time trying to unravel Bond’s past. There is certainly nothing about this plot that keeps the film from becoming yet another cat and mouse game filled with scene after scene of government officials wondering if Bourne is coming after them … or if he’s after something else.
Bourne was the franchise that helped rescue Matt Damon’s career after Oscar-bait bombs like All the Pretty Horses and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Now it’s the franchise that he’s going to have to leave behind and find the next big thing.
