Note: Spoilers follow for Jason Bourne.
On Twitter, I quipped
that the most unrealistic part of the new Jason Bourne movie, Jason Bourne, is that there is a
tech-like Comic Con panel, and somehow, Chris Hardwick isn’t hosting it.
However, that was more because it struck me as a funny line, whereas the truth
was a bit less humorous. “Somehow, an armored police SWAT truck and a Dodge
Charger tear through the streets of Vegas, with the armored car plowing through
a row of about 20 cars with drivers in them at one point.”
There are
some Grand Theft Auto-level traffic
hijinks going on in this movie, except that in the video game, cars get
destroyed after a couple crashes. In contrast, Jason Bourne has multiple action sequences where cars and
motorcycles manage to survive hopping over curves, smashing other cars, and
being used as battering rams. The drivers are usually unaffected by these
crashes, but they at least have the slight justification of being trained
assassins.
Anyway, this
is by far the most mindless of the Bourne
movies, to its detriment. I liked the original trilogy because they
combined the car chases and hand-to-hand fighting of conventional action movies
with an existential crisis. There was always a lingering feeling that Bourne
was uneasy with his power, and using it reluctantly.
In contrast,
Jason Bourne uses flimsy
justification to get the “gang” back together. You see, there is a NEW evil,
government surveillance program that’s way worse than the one from the original
trilogy, and because of that, Julia Stiles needs to get herself a movie paycheck,
because rent on a good New York City loft is high.
… Okay,
maybe she really liked the script or something. I don’t know why, though. It
basically takes some current buzzwords and hot news stories – Facebook!
Wikileaks! Surveillance! Greek riots! – and throws them into a blender. The
result is something that feels more appropriate for a bad CBS show that your
parents watch, not a motion picture I paid $10 for. This film features a lot of
dramatic, unrealistic Hacking and Surveillance and Bugging. Yes, it’s the CIA,
but they still can’t turn a grainy image into crystal clear by yelling,
“Enhance!”
As a result,
the only thing really propping the movie up is Bourne, and hey, Matt Damon is
Matt Damon. He’s still friggin’ great. As pointed out in a review on
RogerEbert.com by Brian Tallerico, Damon probably has 25 lines of dialogue
in the entire film. He works though as the quiet, steely type that’s the
closest thing to a “realistic” superhero we have in the movies.
Damon gets
to do cool Bourne-stuff, like decking guys with one punch in unlicensed bare-knuckles
boxing matches, a la Snatch, although Bourne does his
work in the desert. (Side note: Remember when Jason Statham was funny?)
The only other character that gets to show some “personality” is Vincent Cassel
as the unnamed Asset, essentially a predecessor to Bourne. Cassel manages to
convey antagonism with his sneers and stares, which is important, since he
doesn’t get much screen time because we need 20 scenes about hacking and data
gathering.
Speaking of,
the rest of the cast feels somewhat wasted. Tommy Lee Jones plays the heavy,
CIA director Robert Dewey, but he’s so far to the Evil side of the ledger that
you can’t ever really put yourself in his shoes. There is more nuance in the
positions of Iron Man and Captain American in Marvel’s Civil War. Alicia Vikander is incredibly easy on the eyes as the
CIA counter-intelligence technology something or other, but because the movie
is so muddled in its plot, it’s unclear what her motivations are.
Something
for the sequel, I suppose. It’s unclear if the movie will get one, but so far,
it’s made $246 million against a budget of $120 million, suggesting it’s a
modest hit even without being released in China, Mexico or Russia yet. I’d be
game for another installment, just because Damon is getting older and that
would be an interesting dynamic to play with, plus the biggest hanging curve
with the series is, “How does Bourne actually continue with his life?” By the
end of Jason Bourne, pretty much
every significant person in Bourne’s life is dead, except Pam Landy (not in
this movie) and Paz, the assassin from the third movie (also not in this
movie). They still have some room to run with the series, but not much.
Want to support Steve’s blogging? Then
purchase something via the Amazon clickthru link for Your Parents Basement, Steve’s other
project! To read all of Steve’s past Inexplicable Movie Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable TV Reviews, click here! For Inexplicable Video Game Reviews, click here! And for Inexplicable Book Reviews, go here!
