Digital dragnet tightens ‘Jason Bourne’

Damon returns to franchise after 9 yr break

JBy Jake Coyle

ason Bourne, as played by Matt Damon across four movies, is forever disappearing off the grid only to reluctantly resurface years later and again menace the CIA. He’s the spy who came in from the cold only to return to the cold, come in again, and, yet again, head back to the cold.

In the chilly and bleak “Jason Bourne,” the amnesia-ed assassin has been resurrected again, along with director Paul Greengrass, with whom Damon returns to the franchise after a nine year break. Bourne is still brooding. Greengrass’ hand-held camera is still frenetic. And the saga’s lethal precision is still sharp.

The spy game, already far from a drinking affair in previous installments, is resolutely grim in “Jason Bourne.” The superspy, now a hulking mass of bullet-scarred muscle, is spending his days torturing himself in bareknuckle brawls, haunted by his past. In shattering set-pieces and terse emotion-less dialogue, any remaining sunlight has been drained away. The amount of people brazenly killed by Vincent Casell, the “asset” in Bourne’s pursuit, may well outnumber the words spoken by Bourne in the entire film.

Though first conceived in 1980 by Robert Ludlum, Bourne is perhaps the ultimate post9/11 hero. Especially in the hands of Greengrass (who also employed his gritty realism in the Sept. 11 drama “Flight 93”), Bourne is a wrecking ball of accountability for America’s clandestine past. He’s part fantasy (his preternatural control of out-of-control events is reassuring) and part reality (American disillusionment made visceral).

In “Jason Bourne,” the digital dragnet is tightening around Bourne. The film is selfconsciously set in a post-Snowden world; the CIA is hacked by Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles, whose smarts have given all of these films a kick), who’s threatening to reveal the covert Treadstone operation.

The film, penned by Greengrass and Christopher Rouse (editor of previous “Bourne” films, and also this one), introduces a tech magnate (Riz Ahmed) whose celebrated social networking platform is secretly feeding information to CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, whose wonderful sad face at this point has everything good and bad about America written all over it).

Remember

In a way, Bourne is himself a leak. He’s a rogue weapon who can’t remember his own encryption code. Here, the mystery he’s trying to solve revolves around his father’s role in his initial recruitment.

But aside from updating to today’s surveillance state, “Jason Bourne” largely sticks to the franchise’s familiar moves, and they often don’t have the same kinetic finesse they used to. Here again are scenes of digging through old CIA documents, breathless stretches of crowded escapes and public rendezvous where Bourne fools lurking agents.

The film is essentially sandwiched between two mammoth, extended set pieces: First, a fiery riot in Athens where Bourne comes out of hiding to meet Parsons; and later, a showdown in Las Vegas that brings him back to U.S. soil. Both outstay their welcome (a vehicle plowing through traffic in Vegas has unfortunate shades of the tragedy in Nice) and the franchise’s propulsion gives way to a pummeling blunt force.

The exception is Alicia Vikander, who enters the franchise as the CIA’s cyber ops head and has her own motives of tossing aside the agency’s old guard. Whenever she’s on screen, her steely but agile presence brightens the film’s dour gaze.

Yet even when “Jason Bourne” doesn’t click with the same rhythm as its predecessors, it has a weight that outclasses nearly every other big action movie around. National identity is investigated and violence has repercussions: both astonishing things in a summer blockbuster.

But if Bourne re-emerges again, hopefully Greengrass and company can at least give him someone to talk to.

“Jason Bourne,” a Universal Pictures release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “intense sequences of violence and action and brief strong language.” Running time: 123 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

It’s a sweltering afternoon in Hollywood and Matt Damon has just gotten out of couple’s therapy.

Don’t worry, it was just with Jimmy Kimmel — a continuation of the fake feud that started over 10 years ago before the two had even met.

“It takes a really surreal turn because we got a real therapist and we play it totally straight,” said Damon seated in the green room of Kimmel Studios. After “therapy,” Damon had about 10 minutes to do a photo shoot, film an intro for a festival he can’t attend and scarf down a salad. This is life on the blockbuster circuit.

Promoting

Damon, 45, is promoting “Jason Bourne,” a film that nine years ago both he and director Greengrass thought would never happen. After three movies exploring the story of the super spy created by Robert Ludlum, the last two of which were directed by Greengrass, and a particularly difficult shooting experience with “The Bourne Ultimatum,” Damon was done.

The name would come up often, though, in meetings and from fans. In 2009, around the time Damon and Greengrass did “Green Zone,” they flirted with getting another one going but there just wasn’t a story. Universal Pictures, meanwhile, moved on, expanding the Bourne universe with a film focused on another agent played by Jeremy Renner. It did well enough, and a sequel was in the works. Then, in 2014, Greengrass and Damon took a look at the world and realized how much had changed.

“Paul called and said that the first set piece would be an austerity riot in Athens,” Damon said. “I’m like, ‘OK, we’re back.’”

But they made sure to structure their production schedule so they weren’t coming up with the script while they were shooting — as was the case with “Ultimatum.”

“When you’re in production, you’re lighting money on fire and you can feel it. What (co-writers) Paul (Greengrass) and Chris (Rouse) did this time, which is great, was they took a whole year and showed up with 120 pages that you want to shoot,” Damon said. “We knew once we said we were going to do it, that we were going to get a release date, so we just got all of our ducks in a row.”

And it worked. For “Ultimatum,” they shot for 138 days. “Jason Bourne” was a trim 95.

The film, out Friday, is partially about the world of government surveillance, introducing CIA agents played by Jones and Alicia Vikander. The high octane hunt takes Bourne to the requisite international locales and even a few domestic ones — including Las Vegas, where one set piece features a SWAT vehicle plowing through cars on the strip. It’s eerily reminiscent of the recent incident in France.

The marketing team pulled the scene from European ads immediately, he said.

“That was just horrific,” Damon said. “None of us felt like it was a copy-cat thing, but we didn’t want to be insensitive with those images out there.”

It makes him think of the objections to the posters showing him wielding a gun — a sentiment he keenly understands.