Is Jason Bourne turning into a creaky old has-been? I don’t mean physically, of course—the new film, titled simply Jason Bourne, opens with the former spy eking out an existence as a bare-knuckle fighter in rural Greece and Matt Damon can still be described as boyish at 45.
No, where the resurrected Bourne franchise is showing his age is in the tired old privacy debate at the story’s heart: what price “public safety” in this age of super-surveillance? Yawn.
It’s nearly 10 years since director Paul Greengrass and Damon made The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and where their previous collaborations were topical in their unpacking of the dark arts of the intelligence agencies in the age of rendition and government-sanctioned torture, the new Bourne already feels dated.
Specifically, Jason Bourne is playing catch-up to Captain America and James Bond—which is quite galling after the hard-hitting Bourne forced both 007 and Marvel’s iconic superhero to up their games by embracing a new, gritty realism and moody topicality.
The bad guy is another dodgy CIA director, Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones), who is in cahoots with a social media giant called Dream Team, founded by Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed) with secret CIA cash.
However, having struck a Faustian pact to provide government access to its customers’ data, Kalloor starts having second thoughts. “I’m done selling out our customers,” yells Kalloor. “We funded your start up,” growls back Dewey.
Aside from the fact that it’s all a bit silly and implausible, especially for a Bourne movie (not least when the CIA hard ass and the tech entrepreneur share a public platform to debate the issues), the arguments being rehearsed are very over-familiar.
Back in 2014, Captain America: The Winter Soldier built its story around the same debate and delivered something much fresher and punchier, earning praise, ironically, for it’s “Bourne-like” realism and hot-button newsworthiness.
Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, went rogue (very Bourne) after uncovering a top-secret defense program, Project Insight, which infiltrated every aspect of people’s lives.
“This isn’t freedom, this is fear,” he pronounced gravely. James Bond uncovered a similarly sinister establishment plot in Spectre after learning that a greasy-pole climbing government bureaucrat, known as C, played by Andrew Scott, was behind a global surveillance and intelligence network called Nine Eyes.
So Bourne is behind the times, adding to the feel of a franchise that is struggling to reinvent itself and remain relevant four years after The Bourne Legacy, the Greengrass/Damon-free Bourne movie that starred Jeremy Renner and was directed by Bourne scribe Tony Gilroy.
With the two main players unwilling to return, Universal greenlit The Bourne Legacy to keep their deal with the estate of Bourne author Robert Ludlum, but the picture underperformed, grossing a little over half the $442 million earned by The Bourne Ultimatum.
For Jason Bourne, a reboot in all but name, Universal took no chances and instructed the filmmakers to make something as close to the earlier films as possible.
Market research showed that what audiences love most about Bourne—aside from the propulsive action—was his identity crisis, as explored by Damon at his most intense
“Who am I?” That’s the question Bourne has wrestled with since the beginning, and he does so once again in Jason Bourne as the filmmakers thread in a mystery about his father. Fans might find it a satisfying encore, but the rest of us will wonder where Jason Bourne goes from here.
Matt Damon gives you the #JasonBourne franchise recap in 90 seconds.https://t.co/72isoyjV2y
— IMDb (@IMDb) July 26, 2016
