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Matt Damon swings back into action in after-thought Jason Bourne |
Director: Paul Greengrass
Cast: Matt Damon (Jason Bourne), Tommy Lee Jones (Director
Robert Dewey), Alicia Vikander (Heather Lee), Vincent Cassel (The Asset), Julia
Stiles (Nicky Parsons), Riz Ahmed (Aaron Kalloor), Ato Essandoh (Craig
Jeffers), Scott Shepherd (Edwin Russell), Bill Camp (Malcolm Smith), Vinzenz
Kiefer (Christian Dassault), Gregg Henry (Richard Webb)
They say you should never go back. Producers had been
begging Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon to get back together again and make
another Bourne film. After all, there
was hardly anyone asking for a sequel to that Jeremy Renner one was there? But Jason Bourne seems like a film that’s
been made after Greengrass and Damon ran out of reasons for saying no. I can’t
decide if we can blame them for that or not. But their making the film at all
suggests they aren’t really losing any sleep about whether people feel this
half-hearted effort has an impact on the legacy of the others.
Anyway it’s ten years later. The world is an increasingly
technical place, with people living in an era of increasing social unrest and
anti-government fury. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), recovered from his amnesia,
now lives off-the-grid – until of course he’s unearthed by his old colleague Nicky
Parsons (Julia Stiles). Parsons is now working with a hacker commune in
Iceland, and has unearthed more evidence about the shady CIA programme,
Treadstone, that Bourne used to be a part of, and about Bourne’s own
recruitment into it. Meeting in Athens in the middle of an anti-government
riot, Parsons is killed and Bourne is set on a collision course with the CIA as
well as finding out more about the mysterious death of his father 20 years
before.
Jason Bourne is
basically going through the motions. There is an attempt to add another layer
of mystery around Bourne’s background, but it barely seems to add much to the
hinterland of Bourne we’ve already learned about in the last couple of films.
Furthermore, I’m uncomfortable with a Bourne here who goes increasingly on a
rampage of revenge. Part of the charm – or rather what makes Bourne different –
in the previous films was that he was a man who lived in a world of violence,
but didn’t care for it himself. He used brutal force only when it was
absolutely necessary, and several times chose not to take a personal revenge.
Here however, he dispatches at least three people, which doesn’t seem to square
with the character as we’ve previously seen him.
Furthermore, the film seems to be struggling to reclaim
Bourne as one of the formal good guys, a patriot and American hero. Again part
of what made him different in the original trilogy was that he stood outside
the government and nations, that (as Greengrass once said) “he’s on our side”.
Here he’s clearly less than sympathetic to anti-government forces, and strongly
opposed to exposing CIA secrets. In fact he ends up feeling rather conservative
here to be honest, and more like the faceless killer that he started as rather
than a renegade.
It’s not helped by the fact that the plot is pretty meh, a remix of different elements from
previous films, carefully ticked off to make sure we get everything we could expect.
So we get a reworking of various car chases, fights, tense meetings in public
locations etc. etc. The film-making is very well done – Greengrass rewrote the
book on how to make films like this, and he carries that on here, brilliantly
mixing twitchy editing, handheld camera work, immersive film-making and gloomy
silences to create a really wonderfully done viewing experience. It’s just more
of the same from the originals. The film just ends up living in the shadow of
the originals, rather than really forging something out on its own.
Greengrass tries to tap into contemporary ideas. We get the
sense of anti-establishment clashes and Internet data scams – but it never
really feels like it goes anywhere or coalesces into any real point at the end
of it. What is the actual message of this film? There are hints that Tommy Lee
Jones’ gravelly CIA Director and Riz Ahmed’s Mark Zuckerberg-lite tech expert
are planning some sort of mass intrusion on people’s privacy – but the film
never explains this or explores it. It never even makes Bourne aware of it –
and since Bourne is our “window” into this world, that means we never understand
it either.
I mean, the film is fine other than that, but that’s all it
really is. Matt Damon still hasn’t lost it as Bourne – and blimey he should
have some inverted award for how little he speaks in this film – and he has not
only the physicality but also the worn-down, haunted look of a man who has seen way, way
too much. There are professional performances from the rest, but nothing that
stretches any of the actors here, with Alicia Vikander particularly under-used as
an unreadable CIA agent.
But that sums up the whole film. Despite all the attempts to
build in a modern “torn from the headlines” angle to the story, it feels more
like Greengrass and Damon are quite happily (and with some enthusiasm at least)
going through the motions in order to pick up a cheque. And I guess that’s
fine. It just means we are probably not going to rush to see this again.
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