There are a few other off-key notes which suggest that, having reunited, the band isn’t quite playing in tune. Wouldn’t it make more sense if they concentrated on catching terrorists instead?īut the problems with Jason Bourne aren’t all to do with familiarity breeding contempt. #Jason bourne movies in order of story crackIsn’t it ridiculous, for instance, that the CIA is still hunting down Bourne, a task they first had a crack at in The Bourne Identity 14 years ago? Considering how much money, man-power and futuristic technology they have at their disposal in the film, you’d think they would have caught him by now - and yet here they are spending a fortune and mowing down countless innocent bystanders in the attempt. Sometimes, the repetition makes you roll your eyes. After two films which deserved to have “supreme” and “ultimate” in their titles - more or less - any follow-up will inevitably seem like a slightly less impressive retread of what we’ve seen before. They can’t let him do anything that he didn’t do in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum - and there’s no way he can it any more electrifyingly than he did in those. It’s not as if they can let Bourne ski-jump off a cliff, or hop on a space shuttle, or acquire a taste for vodka Martinis and risque one-liners. The downside of this precision, though, is that they haven’t left themselves much room for manoeuvre. They know exactly which elements it has to have in order to distinguish it from every other espionage thriller on the market. Greengrass and Damon (and, to a lesser extent, Liman), have done a positively scientific job of refining the Bourne-movie formula. Partly, it’s a simple matter of the law of diminishing returns. Once you’ve seen Bourne barrelling through crowds of protesters and riot police in a city choked by smoke and tear gas, you’ll never be able to rewatch 007’s daft car chase in Spectre, through a conveniently deserted Rome, without smirking.īut even when Jason Bourne has you on the edge of your seat, it’s still hard to shake the feeling that it isn’t as satisfying as the earlier films. Just to show the copycats how it’s done, he puts the film’s first extended set piece in the middle of an anti-government demonstration in Athens - and the confidence with which he orchestrates the chaos is astounding. Greengrass’s hectic, immersive style has been much imitated since The Bourne Supremacy rewrote the rules of the secret-agent genre in 2004, but no one else has his ability to construct a fight sequence that is so head-spinningly fast and fragmentary, but which is also possible to follow. And once again, Greengrass stages the action with bone-jarring immediacy, using wobbly handheld cameras and rat-a-tat editing to make the viewer feel as if they could be hit by a stray fist or bullet at any moment. Once again, he is never more than half-a-step ahead of his enemies. Once again, Bourne hurtles from one grey and gritty European metropolis to another at breathtaking speed. He believes that Bourne should be dispatched by an assassin known only as The Asset (Vincent Cassel, who is an asset indeed), whereas his shrewd lieutenant (Alicia Vikander) argues that Bourne can be persuaded to rejoin the Agency. Bourne is intrigued enough to investigate further, but his enquiries upset the CIA’s director (Tommy Lee Jones, providing the air of elder-statesman gravitas and deviousness that Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, David Strathairn and Albert Finney brought to prior instalments). The fact that the viewer gets to see an alarmingly muscular Damon with his top off is, I’m sure, an unintended bonus.Īt any rate, Bourne’s anonymous existence is interrupted when his old CIA buddy Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) tracks him down to share some new information about his murky past. It’s disappointing that he hasn’t made more productive use of his phenomenal skills, but the idea is that he was traumatised by his time as a brainwashed black-ops killer. Since we last saw him, Bourne has been living off the grid as a bare-knuckle boxer.
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