The world is a vastly different place than it was in 2002, when Matt Damon first took up the mantle of Robert Ludlum’s amnesiac superspy Jason Bourne. Damon was only 32 then, with a face so boyish he could pass for a college student when he wasn’t leading black-ops agents on breathless chases across Europe.
Fourteen years and five movies into the Bourne franchise, time has provided a twist more poignant than anything a screenwriter could concoct. Damon has returned to the series for the first time since 2007’s Bourne Ultimatum, and the difference is striking. His hair graying, his face lined, his body an imposing wall of muscle that seems constantly in a state of flex, Damon makes no attempt to simply pick up where he left off nearly a decade ago. In Jason Bourne, his superspy has spent the intervening years living off the grid, earning cash as a bare-knuckled boxer drifting from one illegal bout to the next. Time has taken a toll on him; he seems tired and defeated, even as he moves through one set piece to the next with his trademark lethal efficiency.
The movie is bleaker, too, though this franchise has always been the anti-Bond—a somber and paranoid rebuttal to 007’s glibness and glamour. By the time his former CIA colleague Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) comes calling with new information about Bourne’s past, he seems irreconcilably out of step with the new world of cyber-spying and data-mining that has taken over. Once the CIA’s most sophisticated weapon, now his makers just see him and his kind as an archaic (if sometimes necessary) nuisance. Bourne’s counterpart and main adversary, a relentless assassin known only as the Asset (Vincent Cassel), is so expendable he doesn’t even have a name.
Bourne has long since pieced together the most intriguing facets of his own puzzle, so the latest installment saddles him with a quest that’s inherently less interesting: figuring out what role his father played in Treadstone, the top-secret program that weaponized Bourne and cooked his brain all those years ago. So Jason Bourne’s plot doesn’t offer anything particularly notable, other than myriad excuses to push Damon’s compelling antihero into explosive, bone-crunching confrontations as he makes his way back to the U.S. to face a future that’s as uncertain as his past.
But if Jason Bourne can’t conjure the drive of early installments where its story is concerned, it makes up for it with the twitchy, paranoid tension that crackles through almost every scene. Bourne isn’t the only one whose place in the world is uncertain. There’s friction between old-school spooks like the CIA director, Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones), who just wants rid of Bourne, and techie Agency upstart Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who thinks Bourne could be brought back into the CIA fold if Dewey would stop sending people to shoot him.
And then, of course, there are director Paul Greengrass’ breathtakingly staged action sequences. Greengrass co-wrote the movie with its editor, Christopher Rouse—an approach to action filmmaking that I find intensely appealing for both its efficacy and its honesty.
Greengrass and Rouse bookend the film with a pair of genuinely thrilling action set pieces, and everything that comes between feels, for better or for worse, exceedingly familiar. There are some game attempts to update the Bourne formula, and the new film has some narrative and thematic tics that are definitely of the moment. Public safety and personal privacy are seen as mutually exclusive luxuries in the world of Jason Bourne, and characters choose sides based on which they think should be sacrificed in service of the other. Edward Snowden’s name is dropped several times; Julian Assange’s isn’t, but his specter is nonetheless present. The CIA isn’t the least bit concerned with foreign threats this time around; its biggest worry is that incriminating information might be leaked to the American public by vengeful hackers or a billionaire social-media mogul.
But its au courant themes are mostly window-dressing. Jason Bourne feels like a throwback, and that’s not a bad thing. Bourne, like the franchise that bears his name, might be worn at the edges by now, and he has few surprises left up his sleeve. But Damon imbues him with irresistible pathos, and Greengrass can craft an action scene like few other directors. It’s hard to complain about the same ol’ thing when it’s a thing that worked so well in the first place.
April Snellings is a staff writer and project editor for Rue Morgue Magazine, which reaches more than 500,000 horror, thriller, and suspense fans across its media platforms. She recently joined the lineup of creators for Glass Eye Pix's acclaimed audio drama series Tales from Beyond the Pale, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick that has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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