‘Jason Bourne’ Is Serviceable, But Are We Happy With Just That?

The ‘Bourne’ saga continues. Does it get a thumbs up or thumbs down?

Matt Damon in a still from Jason Bourne.

It’s been close to one-and-a-half decades since Jason Bourne gave us a spy who was a far cry from the ultimate spy ever – James Bond. Bourne didn’t bother locking himself in a tuxedo, and didn’t blink twice before getting into a hard-knuckled fist fight. In fact, he revelled in so much blood, sweat and dust that Bond was compelled to take the same route, changing the landscape of espionage cinema forever.

Jason Bourne, the fourth film in the Bourne series, has several reasons to cheer its audience as well as countless familiarities that slacken it. That this is the reunion of Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass is the foremost reason why the fan reception will be warm.  

We find Bourne in isolation, taking part in illegal fighting rings amidst the Balkans to make a living before his former colleague Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacks into C.I.A. secret files to download details of top secret programme. This hacking sets the film in motion, because it alerts the C.I.A. of a breach and its consequent link to Bourne, which provides him an impetus to amp up the air miles by flying from one country to the other to solve an abominable mystery about his past.

And because it was Greengrass who had soaked Bourne into his distinctive style of action filmmaking, we are awarded a chase scene in the beginning through a riot infested Athens, where the camera runs like a docudrama hero. The scene has been edited so seamlessly and coherently that maximum chaos turns instead into a breathtaking spell of survival.

Written by Greengrass and his long-term editor, Christopher Rouse, this film nudges you to the uncomfortable territory of internet surveillance, the growing tension between security and privacy in the age of Snowden and Assange.

So we have Alicia Vikander’s Heather Lee, the cyber head, a New Age mind in collision with Tommy Lee Jones’ director Robert Dewey of Old World intimidation, and in between a Zuckerbergish entrepreneur in Riz Ahmed’s Aaron Kalloor. What makes it really beguiling is that all the characters, good, bad and ugly, are or were working for the same organisation.

But for that, we are made to read too many file names on screen, and too many doors get opened and shut. Just too many.

A still from Jason Bourne.

Our amnesiac anti-hero’s identity crisis is on a roll. Oh yes, there’s also Vincent Cassel’s the Asset, a Blackbriar assassin who harbours a personal grudge against our protagonist.

So Bourne is on an inter-continental drive, without any need for directions, like a true blue globetrotter, perusing and being perused.

Action scenes pile up, attending to the right amount of thrills. But it never quite matches up to the brilliance of the chase in Athens, and the climactic set-piece in Las Vegas is designed as a Fast and the Furious routine, bordering on cartoonish spirit.  

This is a film that traumatises the radiant Vikander into expressions of permanent gloom, and Tommy Lee Jones makes it clear that he picked up the role to increase his bank balance.

Damon, reliable as ever, displays the physique of a tough guy, and delivers the goods in an almost non-speaking role. But there is no denying that Bourne looks like a man going through a mid-life crisis, at the crossroads of espionage of two different styles and generations. Jason Bourne is serviceable, but are we really happy with just that?

P.S. - What’s with the pointless 3D?

(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. Follow him on Twitter: @RanjibMazumder)