Bourne again
But the magic isn't there
JASON BOURNE (12A)
FEW movie series get to number five without flirting with Poundland’s DVD shelf.
Those that do survive with their dignity intact, like Bond, or more recently, the Fast And Furious franchise, have done so by regularly reinventing themselves.
Which is precisely what the Bourne movies did with 2012’s The Bourne Legacy – the under-rated fourth film in the spy series.
There was a new roguish hero (played by Jeremy Renner) and a new roster of chemically enhanced superspies.
Sadly, now they’ve gone back to the old formula to bring back Matt Damon’s amnesiac agent.
As Paul Greengrass, the director of Supremacy and Ultimatum, is back behind the camera, the pace is breezy and the action scenes are expertly staged.
But there’s a crushing feeling of familiarity about it all. Greengrass’ big set pieces are another tense chase at a street protest and another shaky camera fist-fight. We also get some rooftop business involving a rival assassin (an underused Vincent Cassel) and plenty of double-dealing at the CIA control room. While Bourne was shaking off his memory loss, I was hit with a severe case of déjà vu.
Since we last met him Bourne has gone “off the grid” and is earning a living battering Eastern Europeans as a bare-knuckle fighter.
He resurfaces when his old ally Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) pops up with a memory stick packed with classified files she’s filched from the CIA’s computer.
But instead of simply handing the stick over at their first meeting, she arranges another rendezvous at an Athens street riot. This doesn’t go unnoticed at the Pentagon, where Tommy Lee Jones appears to have taken the Brian Cox role and Alicia Vikander is a younger Joan Allen.
And so begins a very familiar game of cat and mouse. For a while, it was great to see Bourne back in action. But by the big finale – a punishingly long car chase through the streets of Las Vegas – I was ready to bid a sad farewell to a once great movie franchise.