The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
In a changed world, Matt Damon is Bourne again
Jason Bourne is back in a fourth movie featuring the memory-impaired superspy called, well, “Jason Bourne.”
If you’ll recall, at the end of the third movie about novelist Robert Ludlum’s character, 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum,” Matt Damon’s Bourne finally remembered everything and walked away from the CIA that had been using and chasing him throughout that one, “The Bourne Identity” (2002) and “The Bourne Supremacy” (2004). Damon and Paul Greengrass, who’d directed “Supremacy” and “Ultimatum,” said at the time there was nowhere else to go with the franchise and that they were done.
They’re both back now, though, despite having had nothing to do with “The Bourne Legacy,” Universal Studios’ 2012 place-holder that starred Jeremy Renner and was directed by original Bourne trilogy screenwriter Tony Gilroy. It didn’t do the kind of box office the franchise was accustomed to.
Which, frankly, Greengrass couldn’t have cared less about. Following “Bourne,” the long-haired English filmmaker, who got his start making political documentaries for TV, was content to make feature films that directly addressed real-world matters, such as the Indian Ocean piracy thriller “Captain Phillips” and the Iraq War drama “Green Zone” with Damon.
“Actually, I didn’t think about it,” Greengrass, 60, says of tackling his third Bourne. “Then, I suppose, 18 months or so ago it was really Matt and Chris Rouse, who is a very close collaborator of mine (Rouse has edited most of the director’s camera-swinging, rapidly cut movies). They started to say to me, the world’s changed, maybe we could do a new one, maybe that opens that possibility. I was very much the skeptic in most of those conversations. I was the one going, ‘Oh no, there’s nothing else to do.’
“But I could see that the world had changed, very clearly. In the end, Chris and I decided to sit down and try on the basis of if we found a story we’d make it and if we didn’t, we wouldn’t.”
The script Greengrass and Rouse came up with finds an ethically troubled Bourne living off the grid, supporting himself with bare-knuckle fights he easily wins but, also, making sure he receives some punishment too.
His old CIA ally Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) finds Bourne in Athens just as a financial crisis riot breaks out — shades of and staged like a hyperkinetic version of Greengrass’ breakout feature, the Northern Ire-
Matt Damon appears in a scene from “Jason Bourne.” land-set “Bloody Sunday” — and gives him a flash drive loaded with evidence of more government malfeasance.
Soon, scary CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) and his cyberwiz Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) are tracking Bourne across the planet, with a personally motivated assassin they call “The Asset” (French actor Vincent Cassel) spearheading the ground game. It all ends up in Las Vegas, of all places, with an armored car-led vehicle chase that — shades of Greengrass’ 9/11 docudrama “United 93” — may inadvertently look a little “too soon” after the recent terrorist truck attack in Nice.
Along with all of that, the film constantly, if indirectly, reflects everything from the Edward Snowden case to the recent FBIiPhone unlocking standoff to a suddenly headline-re- lated WikiLeaks scandal in its Info Age scenario.
“You want Bourne to run through a contemporary landscape,” Greengrass explains. “Well, the landscape of ‘ Supremacy’ and ‘Ultimatum’ was 10 years or more ago, and the world is very different now. Ten years ago, there weren’t any smartphones. Ten years ago there hadn’t been a financial crash that had thrown the world into disorder. There weren’t these giant social media companies. There wasn’t a great cyberarena, a fourth dimension that we now inhabit. There hadn’t been Snowden!.
“All these things made the landscape that Bourne was going to run through very, very different. It got interesting when I thought that if the character has reached a tipping point, we’re going to put him in a world that’s reached a tipping point. You think of Athens, the cradle of democracy, and yet what do we see on TV? It’s anything but. It felt like a great place to start.”
From there, however, they had to go somewhere with Bourne that wasn’t about regaining his memory as in the earlier films.
“Of course, he did say, at the end of ‘Ultimatum,’ ‘I remember, I remember everything.’ It was absolutely essential that we stayed true to that,” Greengrass acknowledges. “In other words, you couldn’t cheat on that. You couldn’t have him suddenly say ‘Oh, actually, there’s a bit more I didn’t remember before.’
“But it did seem to us that you can remember many things in your life but you may not understand them fully.”
So, between bouts of cinematic mayhem, Bourne indeed gets new perspective on a key event in his past and digs deeper into the long-running question of whether he was once truly a heartless killer or manipulated by his handlers into acting like one.
“We pretty quickly ruled out the sort of ‘Bourne finds happiness’ route,” Greengrass cracked. “It didn’t seem credible that, after ‘Ultimatum,’ he would have swam away from the Hudson River, gone back to Europe, met somebody, settled down, had children and ran a farm. Much more likely, he would’ve been holed up off the grid, tormented by the guilt of what he had remembered and acting out the divided soul.”
Greengrass’ own soul seems perpetually divided betweenmaking slam-bang action rides and keeping the setting relevant and realistic in a rapidly changing world. He shot the Athens sequence primarily on Tenerife in the Canary Islands; filming a fake riot in unrest-rocked Greece at the time would have been irresponsible, he says.
Cool as the Athens uprising/chase/shootout is, it can’t help but seem a little 2015; when we think of Greece now, what comes to mind are waves of refugees from the Middle East. And this week’s WikiLeaks’ disruption of the DNC notwithstanding, even that, and a lot else in “Jason Bourne,” requires a good deal of mental gymnastics to connect it to the current state of our angry, terrorized and partisan world.
Even if it can’t possibly be entirely up-to-the-minute, though, Greengrass feels “JB” does as good a job of capturing our times as a movie about an impossibly skilled ex-amnesiac can.
“It’s a turbulent world,” he points out. “It’s most exciting when Bourne is moving through contemporary situations. It makes it feel edgy and it makes the franchise live.”