Movie Review: Jason Bourne

“You Know His Name” claim the posters for the latest Jason Bourne adventure, Jason Bourne. If you have seen any of the previous Bourne films (check out our retrospective on all the films), not only do you know his name, but you know this movie as well. Taking the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to extreme lengths, star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass return to the hit spy franchise after sitting out the mediocre The Bourne Legacy. It has been nine years since the two gave us the truly remarkable The Bourne Ultimatum, and even though the two of them have said that they felt they needed to come back for another installment, Jason Bourne never proves why. With the closure Ultimatum gave audiences, Jason Bourne feels like an encore fans wanted, but Greengrass and Damon had nothing left to play so they played another hit song. Sure, it has its moments and will get the adrenaline pumping, but it is the least inspired Bourne flick by far.

After he is pulled out of hiding, Jason Bourne (played by the reliable, yet little spoken, Matt Damon) is given new information about his past that makes him go on the hunt against the CIA. The CIA is worried he will blow the cover off of some of their secret operations, so CIA director Robert Dewey (played by the rapidly aging Tommy Lee Jones) issues orders for him to be taken out. Cyber genius and CIA agent Heather Lee (played by the lovely Alicia Vikander) helps track Bourne down, but questions whether the agency is doing the right thing. The filmmakers are clearly hoping audiences suffer from amnesia like Bourne does because they have made this exact movie multiple times before. Sure, the locations and some of the names might be different, but you can only show Bourne being hunted in a large group while a sniper watches from above so many times before it starts to feel old. Not only that, but the filmmakers might have felt like they needed Bourne to feel relevant in 2016, so they added a secondary storyline that is being used in almost every spy movie released in the last five years. I will not spoil it here, but it’s very frustrating and unfolds in a predictable fashion.

The plot is not the only thing that gets repeated here, but the action scene set-ups are all similar to the ones in previous installments. There is Bourne using large crowds to escape (Supremacy and Ultimatum), a car chase in the downtown of a major city (Supremacy and Ultimatum), hand-to-hand fighting where Bourne uses a random object as a weapon (Identity, Supremacy, and Ultimatum), and Bourne using a random set of stairs to escape during a car chase (Identity). It’s all been done before, and while it is still entertaining in moments, it ultimately feels uninspired by the time the credits roll.

Greengrass returns to the director’s chair after one of the lead writers of the first three films, Tony Gilroy, helmed the not beloved The Bourne Legacy. Perhaps Gilroy’s presence was more important than Universal thought, because he does not return as a screenwriter here and the problem with this movie is not with its direction, but rather with its unoriginal screenplay. Greengrass knows how to stage tension, he does so here and in his other films like the fantastic Captain Phillips. His kinetic directorial style is able to give Jason Bourne a couple of exciting moments, but that falls by the wayside when the film refocuses on the plot. Damon also carries the film at times as he shows how comfortable he is with the character despite being away for nine years.

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. There are some truly exciting moments that seemingly only a Bourne movie could pull off, and that’s great, but it would be better if we could put him in a different situation. I love that Damon and Greengrass came back, and the action scenes prove there is still something in the tank, but if they come back again, maybe they should spend more time in the writer’s room than on-set staging an action sequence.

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Scott Davis

Scott Davis is a recent graduate of Oakland University where he earned a degree in journalism. He worked for the student newspaper on campus, The Oakland Post, where he became the paper's managing editor. He also earned a minor in Cinema Studies at OU. Scott enjoys all things film and TV related, especially the blockbuster kind. He might be the biggest Christopher Nolan fan you know.

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