In what is rapidly becoming the summer of missed blockbuster opportunities, Jason Bourne now adds its name to the heap of overly-hyped, low-performing tentpole thrillers. It's becoming sad and repetitious this summer, with so many possibilities and so many failures. I was really hoping this one would be different with the return of Matt Damon playing our titular hero.
The movie is about Matt Damon returning to the role of the hero that has redefined the spy thriller actioneer. Do you really need to know anything else? You do? Well, he is again trying to live a life in peace, but the bad guys/good guys of the CIA can't let him be. When more information from his past shows up, this supposedly patriotic hero (they make a point to mention this many times throughout) does everything in his power possible to dismantle the organization that protects us all. When a traitorous coward like Snowden is praised for his patriotism (there's a movie coming out about him, too, from, you guessed it, that other patriotic paragon Oliver Stone), it's no wonder this is what is considered laudible and worthy of emulation.
So, back to the story in a moment. First, I am very disappointed with director Paul Greengrass. He has done the equivalent of an actor phoning in a performance. Considering he has already directed two other fairly good Bourne movies (Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum), and basically rewrote the visual lexicon of action movies in the process, he falls back to tired and lazy directorial techniques that are beneath his abilities. He makes extensive use of hand-held cameras (or the vomit-cam as I call it with its ability to make one nauseous). Combining MTV-style frenetic editing with the use of the vomit-cam to get as close to the action as possible, all we are sure of is that there is something kinetic and exciting happening on-screen. It would probably be pretty cool if we could actually see it, but all that is really visible is a blur of action. I realize newer directors make extensive use of hand-held cameras because they think it's cool and edgy (it isn't), and that it's cheaper (it is). But for a seasoned professional like Greengrass, who knows how to frame, choreograph, pace and shoot action quite competently, it just looks lazy and sloppy. The Bourne movies changed the spy movie aesthetic so completely that the James Bond franchise is copying its template, much to the detriment of the last four Bond flicks.
Bourne doesn't particularly need a good performance, but Damon delivers his usual better-than-average style here. He is the one bright spot of the movie, or rather, Bourne being in a Bourne movie is. But the story is hackneyed and cliché-ridden through and through. The movie is basically a simple revenge flick packaged as a chase film. No new ground is covered, and now Bourne is in danger of picking up the tired Bond formula. An event forces him to action, he meets a contact/lover who becomes the sacrificial lamb, he cries, then gets mad, and then spends the rest of the movie on a kill-crazy rampage until all the other guys are dead. And while the Bond franchise has suffered trying to be Bourne, the inverse is true as well. They are fundamentally different stories and heroes. Yet despite studios knowing this, they are repackaging the same vanilla, crowd-pleasing over and over again to satisfy the beast. I would rather see Bourne go back to its roots of a man out of place, or find another original hero. If this is the best we can expect from Bourne, it is breathing its last. Instead of a vibrant and exciting new take on the spy, it sinks into the morass of cookie-cutter sameness that has been plaguing franchises.
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