Matt Damon returns to espionage franchise,
After nine years, he’s older but still explosive as an ex-CIA hitman
Matt Damon returns to the Jason Bourne franchise as the off-the-grid title character who is soon on the run and out to get a crooked CIA director.
A bloodthirsty hit man character in Jason Bourne goes by the utilitarian handle “Asset,” but it’s really a misnomer.
The real asset of this action franchise has always been Matt Damon, whose return to the title role of the amnesiac ex-CIA assassin is an occasion both for celebration and perhaps undue expectations.
When he’s on the screen, searching for his true identity while being pursued by agents of both good and evil, he’s a kinetic presence under the propulsive guidance of returning writer/ director Paul Greengrass and editor/ co-writer Christopher Rouse.
A sympathetic one, too, since Damon has been allowed to age into the role, much as Harrison Ford was for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Damon’s scarred and graying Bourne is now more buff than ever — he drops an opponent with one punch in an opening skirmish — but he’s matured in ways both visible and emotional, as has the actor.
He’s retreated from the world in the nine years since The Bourne Ultimatum, from which the story picks up, but the world hasn’t retreated from him. It’s become more dangerous, with questions about Bourne’s past still unresolved and fatigue being kept at bay by sheer force of will.
A figure from Bourne’s past, Julia Stiles’ Nicky Parsons, is now involved in politically motivated cyber-espionage that will put them both at risk. A paranoid new CIA director (Tommy Lee Jones) and his whip-smart protégé (Alicia Vikander), seek to neutralize them to prevent the release of stolen secret data that is potentially “worse than Snowden.”
The hunt is on, hopscotching across the globe — Athens, Berlin, Washington, Reykjavik, London and Las Vegas among the stops — with Bourne relying on his brawn and wits to counter increasingly sophisticated electronic traps. There’s a significant human ensnarement, too, the aforementioned Asset, played by Vincent Cassel, who is every bit as resourceful and determined as Bourne.
It all flashes by the screen with im- pressive verve — Greengrass is a true action ace — and it’s entirely possible to forget the regrettable fourth franchise film, The Bourne Legacy from 2012, made without the participation of Damon and Greengrass.
But there’s also a certain déjà vu about Jason Bourne, a feeling of going through the motions that can’t be denied, even if those motions are skilfully executed. A subplot about the CIA’s meddling with a Facebooklike social media giant raises serious questions about the invasion of privacy, but it serves more to showcase actor Riz Ahmed’s talents than to advance the plot.
The experience of Jason Bourne may ironically work best for those who are able to put past chapters out of their mind and just thrill to the movement on the screen.