Movie: Jason Bourne Director: Paul Greengrass Cast: Matt Damon, Alicia Vikander, Tommy Lee Jones Rating: |
For a man who's been giving the CIA the slip since 2002, Jason Bourne is slow. Excruciatingly slow. Both as a character and as a movie. Save for the scenes when he gets on a bike in Greece and in a muscle car in Las Vegas, Jason Bourne (again, both man and movie) will bore you to death.
If you're not clued in to the last three movies (I'm opting not to count the one that Matt Damon opted not to act in), there's very little that will make sense about this movie. Long story short, disavowed CIA agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) has now recovered his memory fully and is trying to make sense of why people had been trying to kill him over the course of three movies and six continents. Set a decade after the last movie, Bourne is pretty much in hiding, emerging from the shadows only to fight the odd underground brawl. Very Rambo-esque but lacking any such finesse.
While I'd like to give Matt Damon credit for trying to revive the franchise, watching him play a older, puffier, sluggish, wrinkled version of himself is just plain putting off. Yes, it worked for Stallone. Yes, it worked for Ford. George Clooney heads that club. But Damon? Not quite there yet. He's still figuring out how to grapple with playing an oldish super spy type.
In this film, which ought to be the last in this drawn out film franchise, Bourne is pursued by the new CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones being as classy as always), his head of cyber insurgency Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) and one of Dewey's super-trained assassin types, ingeniously named the Asset.
Through a typically long wound plot, they keep taking shots at each other as they work their way from Europe to Vegas. As with all Bourne movies, everybody is looking to double-cross everybody else. So no surprises there. In a movie that ought to thrive on adrenaline-inducing moments, they are so few and so submerged between what seems like a few hours of needless dialogue, that it is an exercise in futility to keep track of who's doing what.
If you're one of those people who can filter out all that screenplay and switch your brain on when the pace picks up every half hour or so, then this movie might work for you. Otherwise, avoid it like the plague.