Jason Bourne [Review by Haus]

Action provokes reaction, and not just in Newton’s Third Law: Some black swan event causes an unanticipated and outsize effect, and we rush to shore up defenses so that same rare thing won’t happen again. One guy tries to blow up his shoes on a plane in 2001, and for the next fifteen years we all put our boots through the X-ray. We’re continually playing catch up, rushing to plug each new jetting seam.

With this being so, it’s no great surprise that after the 2012 Jeremy Renner reboot/spin-off The Bourne Legacy fell flat, the franchise puppeteers have fled to safer ground. But in doing so, they seem to have misread what made the earlier films so good in the first place.

Gone and forgotten is Renner, yes. But gone also is the Jason Bourne of the first movie, the quick-witted, think-on-your-feet MacGyver of extemporaneous combat, the turtleneck-sporting everyman with a weakness for Running Lolas who cleverly yanks maps from corridor walls and baffles even himself with his close-combat prowess. In his place we get a hard and soulless Matt Damon, one who punches like a spring trap and shoots handguns fast and scowls at everyone. What drives him? Why? Do we even care?

Bourne’s identity, to the extent he has one now, is simply that he’s an effective killer, can take a beating, and seems to care a whole lot more than we do about whatever crystal-anniversary backstory they’ve cooked up this time.

There’s a melancholy to be mined in all this, an emptiness in Bourne, but the film just barely touches on it–preferring instead to fill Damon’s mind with incessant, almost Memento-level obsession over his once-mysterious past (I’m losing track–didn’t we settle that three movies ago?) while at the same time infusing every CIA character with (a) an inexplicable stalker-grade Bourne obsession to the exclusion of all else, (b) a need to narrate every action scene over the radio, and (c) the even more foolhardy notion that Bourne can somehow be repatriated to whatever black-ops program currently graces the agency letterhead. (Such programs must bear names best suited to a frumpy English smithery, like “Treadstone” and “Iron Hand.”) And when muzzles get pressed to CIA flesh, all believability goes right out the window–for their pleas are not of self-preservation, but for Bourne to “come back” to the program. What? Why?

You know, I buy these plotlines a good deal more when they’re just trying to kill the dude.

Thematically, this just wouldn’t be a twenty-teens film without some hemming and hawing about government spying and data privacy. Was nothing learned from the Robocop reboot? (Rhetorical.) I will say though that Riz Ahmed is fabulous as social media billionaire Aaron Kalloor. He plays the semi-naive idealism just right and is a true joy to watch here. Tommy Lee Jones must be trading on twenty year old headshots, but does a passable job as the CIA boss. It-girl du jour Alicia Vikander (marvelous in Ex Machina and fun in The Man From UNCLE) does nothing too special here, save for the curious slight accent she puts on for the role. Damon does what he does, though it’s clear that he has been, as The Rock says, blessing the steel in his iron paradise. He looks seriously diesel.

(Brief aside: I must express my delight (for myself and other He-Dogs) that a character in this movie is named simply “Asset.” Presumably “Special Asset” and “Wild Meandering Beast” cannot be far behind.)

But what of the action, you ask? Yes, indeed it’s here–but much like the glitzy Vegas backdrop, it’s a heaping buffet and there’s too much of everything to build any real meaning or suspense. In tread[stone]ing back to his money-making safe place, director Paul Greengrass has distilled the franchise down to an almost Michael Bay-level of mayhem. Action sequences need a hook to draw the viewer in–the James Bonds are typically good at this, as was Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. But here, too many of them just drone on, crashing and smashing and shooting and burning for what feels like forever. (I grant that this action ennui may stem partly from my having just lived two back-to-back Thursdays–I awoke at 4am in Australia, lived one Thursday in transit, then landed before 7am the same day in San Francisco and have now lived another. But surely Bourne does the same?)

Those who’ve spent much time in Vegas will marvel at how many minutes of car chase are milked from driving on two blocks of the Strip. It’s like the famous neverending runway in Fast & Furious 6. That said, it is those Sin City action scenes that came closest to sweeping me up in the moment. It’s a really solid action film for a while there.

Upshot? This movie just about grasps greatness for about ten minutes in Las Vegas. Great. So do a lot of us.

Ultimately, the dreary, hard-fisted protagonist casts a pall that even a well-timed Moby remix can’t cure.

Haus Verdict: Nonstop action and a meanish, blank-eyed Damon deliver a passable action film that, sadly, adds little to the canon. 

Jason Bourne opens Friday, July 29. 

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