The spy franchise is back, but no closer to unravelling his true identity
|||JASON BOURNE
DIRECTOR: Paul Greengrass
CAST: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed
CLASSIFICATION: 13 V
RUNNING TIME: 117 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
A SHAKY camera capturing brutal, up-close, hand-to-hand combat, a destructive car chase, secretive CIA assassins and someone going: “Jesus Christ, that’s Jason Bourne” as they stare at a big screen.
Yep, Matt Damon is back as Jason Bourne to right the ship after Bourne Legacy threw it slightly off course four years ago. After all, it says “Bourne” in the titles and this series is built around the person more than all the violent things that happen around him.
Set several years after The Bourne Ultimatum, we now get Bourne fully recovered from his amnesia and not liking himself too much. Nicky Parsons (Stiles) tracks him down to point out that remembering is not the same as knowing and she has figured out that the Black Ops programme that created him has been restarted in another guise.
Matters are complicated when the CIA notice that Bourne is still around – if only we noticed potential terrorists this fast in real life – and the chasing and fighting ensue. Vikander is the smart young thing, Heather Lee, who thinks she has the skills to bring him in, while Jones, her boss, CIA director Robert Dewey, is the weathered old hand who leans more towards simply getting rid of the problem.
Cassel doesn’t get a name, he is simply The Asset, an assassin brought in to finish Bourne, but we learn there is history between his character, Dewey and Bourne.
While the conspiracy theory around super soldiers continues, this film is set in a real- world context of internet privacy versus governments wanting access to information.
Ahmed is the creator of a social network the CIA wants to use to data mine people, but this context plays second fiddle to the fighting, running and potential for mayhem.
So, too, Bourne’s very personal search into his own history is not delved into enough as we get more details of what happened, but not enough of why – though that could possibly be the set-up for a sequel.
Director Greengrass brings his A game in terms of complex staging of a chaotic action sequence – the Greek night-time riot is a marvel of precision in how the characters move through the smoke and flames even as the shaky, unfocused close-up camera work confuses you as to exactly what is happening. So, too, the car chase scene in Las Vegas is insanely intense because of the precision work required to pull it off, but afterwards you do wonder, why?
Fast-paced, with a score that really ratchets up the tension, this is a thrilling return to a very familiar landscape. As a kinetically charged episode, it does bring the focus back to Bourne, but little else.
We know Bourne is a scary killing machine when pressed into a corner and his very uncertainty about his identity and morality is what was used to propel him in the past, what made him such an interesting character.
His struggle to reconstruct a shattered identity made him a post-modern update to Robert Ludlum’s Cold War spy. Here, the older Damon is wearily convincing as the spy haunted by his past, and all the digital surveillance updates him into a very current context, but once all the running stops, you realise very little has actually happened, other than a course correction to the franchise.
If you liked Bourne Ultimatum, you will like this.