Movie Review: 'Jason Bourne'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Matt Damon is Bourne again.
Hey, why bury the lead?
The actor, coming off his Oscar-nominated lead performance last year in The Martian, returns to his signature role, the title character in Jason Bourne.
It's the fifth installment in the series of action spy thrillers based on the novels of Robert Ludlum about the anguished amnesiac assassin in the CIA that kicked off with The Bourne Identity in 2002, followed by The Bourne Supremacy in 2004, then The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007.
Next, Damon sat out 2012's The Bourne Legacy, which instead starred Jeremy Renner as a different main character.
Not a reboot but a whole new chapter, Jason Bourne brings back the title character in what amounts to a direct sequel to The Bourne Ultimatum.
And while having seen the previous installments certainly enriches the viewing experience, it's not a narrative necessity.
Damon returns under the direction of Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Green Zone, Captain Phillips), who previously directed Supremacy and Ultimatum, as the lethal weapon with memory loss in yet another energetic, breathless, violent, old-school spy flick.
Like its predecessors, Jason Bourne is characterized by exotic locales, chases galore, jittery editing, darting handheld camerawork, extensive hand-to-hand combat, and suspenseful cat-and-mouse drama.
And it's – will wonders never cease -- blessedly free of computer-generated special effects.
Damon, also serving as co-producer for the first time, is once again magnetic and empathetic in his defining lead role, playing a guy who was brainwashed and turned into an elite secret-ops hit man.
Jason Bourne is set several years after Bourne's disappearance at the conclusion of Ultimatum. Currently living and bare-knuckle underground boxing under another identity somewhere in Greece, Bourne has gradually regained his memory and now remembers who he is.
Little does he know that there are hidden truths about his family and his past.
But, as is said to him at one point by his CIA colleague and ex-handler, Nicky Parsons, played by Julia Stiles: "Remembering everything doesn't mean you know everything."
He re-surfaces unexpectedly at a time when the world has changed substantially, when there is a new reliance on high-tech surveillance and the world is faced with unprecedented instability, and when a new, globally structured program has been developed to draw him out of the shadows and hunt him down.
Mysterious CIA director Robert Dewey, played by Tommy Lee Jones, assigns hacker and counterinsurgency expert Heather Lee, played by Alicia Vikander, the task of locating Bourne. Meanwhile, the imposing and resourcefully murderous villain is played by Vincent Cassel.
The screenplay -- written by Greengrass and the film's editor, Christopher Rouse, who also edited Supremacy and Ultimatum – certainly links to the past, but also reflects ways in which the world is now different than it was a decade-and-a-half ago. But its exploration of the security-versus-privacy issue is fleeting , to say the most.
Rouse's unusual combination of contributions and responsibilities should tell you something about how crucial pacing and tempo and editing are to the finished product.
Damon, letting the action do the talking, actually has very few lines in a nonverbal star turn that is anything but chatty.
But the film loses a measure of empathic drama with the protagonist's memory back in his arsenal.
As sequels go, Jason Bourne may not feel necessary, but it's absorbing nonetheless, even if the seemingly constant shaky cam deployment is a bit much.
And while the film has kinetic energy to spare, perhaps we might have appreciated being spared some if it.
Think of it as not quite up to the standards of the first three installments, but about as impactful as the previous one.
So we'll spy on 2-1/2 stars out of 4 for Jason Bourne, a muscular, dizzying action thriller that carries on the tradition of, but is not quite as exciting as, the franchise's first-Bourne.
