Jason Bourne – Movie Musings

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.

Even with two guns and Jeremy Renner’s face, Aaron Cross isn’t that interesting

Director: Tony Gilroy

Cast: Jeremy Renner (Aaron Cross), Rachel Weisz (Dr Marta Shearing), Edward Norton (Col. Eric Byer), Stacy Keach (Adm. Mark Turso), Dennis Boutsikaris (Terrence Ward), Oscar Isaac (Outcome #3), Joan Allen (Pamela Landy), Albert Finney (Dr Albert Hirsch), David Strathairn (Noah Vosen), Scott Glenn (Ezra Kramer), Donna Murphy (Dita Mandy), Michael Chernus (Arthur Ingram), Corey Stoll (Zev Vendel), Željko Ivanek (Dr Donald Foite), Elizabeth Marvel (Dr Connie Dowd)

What do you do when the people want more sequels to your film series but you can’t persuade the star and director (no matter how much money you offer) to make another film? Well you can either re-cast or you can put another character front and centre in a sequel. The Bourne Legacy goes for the latter approach and invents a new series of characters and shady CIA programmes so that we can put the old chase-and-fight formula back to work.

Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) has been mentally and physically enhanced as part of a series of CIA black ops, overseen by shady CIA bigwig Ed Norton. After the events of Bourne Ultimatum (which overlap with the first quarter of this film), the CIA cuts its losses and orders the deaths of all the agents (including Cross) and the scientists (including Rachel Weisz’s Dr Shearing). Of course both Cross and Shearing survive and go on the run. Despite the writing tying itself into knots to connect its story to the previous films, that’s the sum of the plot. Hardly gripping.

This strange historical curiosity spends the first half of its running time attempting to justify its existence. Extensive narrative hoops are jumped through and new footage carefully interwoven with clips from the previous two movies to try and suggest “a plot behind the plot”. It’s a mistake. No one needs to know why the film exists: we just want to get on with a cracking story. Instead we spend an inordinate amount of time unravelling this “sidequel” attempt at franchise expansion, meandering around unengaging and complex plotting that totally fails to engage the interest.

So long winded are these plotting gymnastics, it’s a good two-thirds of the way into the film before our villain becomes aware of our hero’s survival. Our hero never becomes aware of the villain (an unclear flashback is put into place so they share the screen) and only guesses at who is chasing him. This means the chase elements of the film never really click into place and lack anything for the viewer to invest in. The “hero” is an assassin whose objective is to keep hold of his enhanced intellect, obtained from drugs on the “programme”. Well good for him, but its hardly a sympathetic reason for us to root for him. He’s still an unrepentant killer.

This isn’t helped by the giggle-worthy flashback scenes of Jeremy Renner in his pre-enhanced state, where Renner seems to be aping Ben Stiller’s performance of Simple Jack in Tropic Thunder. In his enhanced state, Cross is fully aware he is an assassin and a willing volunteer – embracing the very dark secret Bourne was so ashamed of. Neither Cross nor Shearing ever have their actions questioned, or display any sense that they have done anything wrong – it seems clear that they would have continued their dirty deeds quite happily without the plot’s intervention. It’s fine to have morally compromised heroes in a film – but this film doesn’t seem to realise or comment on this at any point.

Whatever your views on the characters, the fact remains that this is a chase movie where the chase is not interesting, takes far too long to get started and never really gets the viewer feeling the tension. As an editor of action, Gilroy is no Paul Greengrass and the fight sequences have the same cold distance to them that the rest of the film has, a by-the-numbers series of clashes where it’s hard to really care what happens.

A brilliant cast of actors is totally wasted. Poor Jeremy Renner does his very best here – he has charm, he’s a charismatic performer, but this is a dull character who we are given no real reason to invest in. Rachel Weisz plays the sort of damsel distress (matched up with the “film scientist” trope) an Oscar winner surely can do without. Edward Norton as with so many other films makes his contempt and boredom with the film totally apparent. Allen, Finney and Straitharn have little more than single scene cameos. A host of great character actors (Isaac, Marvel, Stoll, Ivanek, Keach, Murphy) are totally wasted.

This is a dull, formulaic, unloved sequel that spends more time trying to place itself into the timeline of the previous movies than developing a storyline and characters we actually care about. It moves slowly from location to location, sprinkling in some inadequately filmed fights and chases, never once persuading us that we should care about anything that happens.