Jason Bourne

A decade has passed since Jason Bourne turned his back on the CIA. Trying to draw Bourne out of hiding, CIA director Robert Dewy (Tommy Lee Jones) assigns an assassin to kill Bourne. On the run with rogue employee at the Treadstone Paris safehouse, Nikki Parsons (Julia Stiles). 

Much like The Bourne Supremacy, the termination goes awry and the Dewy's hitman ends up shooting Parsons instead of Bourne which paints a bulls-eye on Dewy's back. 

It seems as though the actions taken by the CIA swirl around a network hack "worse than Snowden." - a sign that Paul Greengrass has what I call Filmmakers Block - the Hollywood version of Writer's Block - blowing a lot of hot-aired action sequences to compensate for the crumbling, over-used plot. I thought, this isn't the Greengrass-Damon creation that is Bourne. Jason Bourne is not a cliché. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I was baffled! Then, I figured it out. 

Action flicks like this heavily rely on the bad guys. Chris Cooper in the first Bourne as the hard-boiled Conklin was pitch-perfect. You take one look at him and think, "robotic CIA-type SOB." Then, there's Joan Allen, who was casted as the CIA's pit bull taking over for Conklin, left to cover up his mess, fatefully discovering the CIA's dirty little secrets in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum and ultimately helping Jason chip away at the agency's cover-up. The move from Landy to Dewy was a slap in the face, although the interim handler of cases related to the Blackbriar, the Treadstone upgrade in The Bourne Legacy eased the transition. 

"Yet good movies work in mysterious and subversive ways." writes Owen Gleiberman in his article for Variety.com. Damon showed off his brawn in all three movies. Jason Bourne gives us another angle of our hero - a more introspective man who has been beaten down by a life of uncertainty and running from his past - all the while surveying the surveillance. The seduction of witnessing goings-on behind walls carries an existential force that propels the movie forward. In the center of one of those covert ops is Alicia Vikander’s Heather Lee. At first glance, Lee appears to be an update to Nicki, as she seems open to Bourne, but her blood turns icy as Vikander's compelling performance as a government robot forms. 

Gleiberman continues: "It’s a propulsive Hollywood thriller, not a seminar. Yet there are certain movies that channel what’s going on in a way that’s deeper then preaching. The liberal message on the Edward Snowden era comes down to: Less surveillance…good! That’s the message of 'Jason Bourne' as well." 

BUT that's not the central motif. It is the underlying message behind a slow-burning thriller.