As fun as cows eating grass
Matt Damon returns to memorable spy role and does a lot of staring
Something occurred to me early on in Jason Bourne — as Julia Stiles stares intently at a laptop in some kind of eastern European hacker frat house, waiting for the top-secret CIA server she’d infiltrated to offer up its digital goodies to her thumb drive.
Meanwhile Alicia Vikander, perched over a computer screen in a government cyber-security lab on the other side of the globe, says something urgent-sounding about malware and encryption keys and unauthorized access.
I realized computers are just about the worst thing to have happened to the spy thriller since the widespread abandonment of day-to-day formal wear. Nobody knows quite what to do with them.
Watching somebody type on a computer is about as interesting as watching cows eat grass. At least grass-eating cows would be a change from routine — unlike computers, which many of us type on all day. This seems especially ridiculous when it’s Hollywood stars doing the typing.
Here’s this ultra-fit, practically super-human secret agent, Jason Bourne, who’s built like a welterweight MMA fighter and can drive like a Formula One pro, and the filmmakers have mainly got him gawking at a PC monitor, or glued to his iPhone.
Meanwhile, Stiles, Vikander, Tommy Lee Jones, Ato Essandoh and everybody else in this picture spends its running time doing much the same thing — that’s staring, not running.
Computers have changed a lot in the 14 years since The Bourne Identity, but the familiar conventions of computer use in spy films haven’t changed at all. This is the sort of movie where slow-loading work-inprogress task bars are meant to be exciting and suspenseful, or where blurry zoomed-in photos on a big screen are made miraculously clear when somebody says “enhance.”
Probably most modern espionage does take place on the frontier of the web, between not particularly animated people hunched over grimy keyboards. But this is a spy thriller. What happened to the more exotic breed of gadgets and gizmos — the laser-shooting watches and exploding pens? Why are the life and times of Jason Bourne so drab?
So most of the tech that furnishes Bourne seems old-fashioned, even quaint. What’s jarring is how awkwardly the plot has been wrenched into the present day. When Stiles hacks the CIA and purloins a motherlode of sensitive data, planning to upload it to the Internet, and Jones, the director of the CIA, asks an aide how bad the breach is, the aide says flatly that it could be “worse than Snowden.” It comes out like a punchline.
Later, Jones — who looks like he’s having about as much fun acting in the film as I had watching it, which is to say none at all — tries to bully a hotshot California billionaire into making his new Facebookesque social media platform a surveillance resource for the government.
Every word of dialogue this subplot prompts on the subject of back doors and data mining sounds as if it were written by people who have never used the Internet in their lives. It’s all supposed to seem very in-touch and relevant and hip. It sounds like yesterday’s news.
Of course the only idea of real interest the Bourne films ever had was formal rather than thematic or conceptual. They popularized a style: That motion-sickness action potpourri, the experience of watching that always struck me like being the ball inside a spraypaint can. The basic idea is that camera should be as close as possible to the action it’s shooting . The practical effect is that most of the action is impossible to see.
Paul Greengrass, director of this Bourne and two others, took the torch, so to speak, from Doug Liman, who devised the look for The Bourne Identity: He has been honing it with his director of photography, Barry Ackroyd, ever since. In a sense it isn’t just Bourne who’s triumphantly returning. It’s that hash of a style: The shaky-cam is back — and it’s as unpleasant as I remember.
Jason Bourne concludes with a big climactic car chase down a Las Vegas motorway. It wasn’t clear to me at any given time where the cars were in relation to one another, or where they were in relation to other traffic, or what direction they were moving in, or what their destination might be. At a certain point, you just have to give up and wait until the cars have stopped moving to see who emerges victorious.
Which is, come to think of it, the one nice thing about Jason Bourne’s much-beloved computer exploits: At least they’re comprehensible, however dull they may be.