I saw a bystander’s iPhone video of the stunt back when it was shot it’s far more impressive than what made it into the movie. The last big stunt of the Las Vegas car/SWAT tank trunk is a key example it ends with a big-ass flip stunt that should be awe-inspiring, yet he never even lets us see it in a wide shot, inexplicably keeping his cameras inside the vehicles.
Greengrass seems particularly out to lunch I’ve never been one of those to complain about his reliance on handheld photography and helter-skelter staging (it’s always seemed organic to the drama), but he frequently abandons all sense of geography or clarity, with action beats that are too shaky, too close, and too choppy. They can still hit the notes (in spots, at least), but they sure as hell don’t sing it with much feeling anymore. You won’t walk out of Jason Bourne with any more evidence of the need to revisit this story than you walked in with Greengrass and Damon come off less like returning storytellers than aging rock stars, back out for an encore of a song they’ve grown tired of singing. Yet Marshall’s conundrum remains, and aside from a half-hearted attempt to construct a lackluster origin/revenge story, it’s never solved.
So that didn’t really leave us a wide source of story material.” That logic led to The Bourne Legacy, which attempted to shift the series to a new protagonist, but mixed reviews and disappointing box office apparently led Universal to back the appropriately weighted trucks of money up to Supremacy and Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass and original trilogy star Matt Damon’s homes, so here we are. Producer Frank Marshall, a veteran (one of the few) of all five films, said it himself in 2012: “Jason Bourne knew what his name was and where he came from and he didn’t really want to be an agent anymore.
And I know, I know, no movie has to exist, but the fundamental dilemma of this failed franchise jump-starter is that the trilogy – The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) – came to such a satisfying, self-contained conclusion.
Jason Bourne’s problems start at the foundation, with the very question of its own reason for existence. Well, Jason Bourne has arrived, like a blaring siren, wooping a warning: they can even fuck these up. And in this particularly vile summer of mainstream moviemaking – in which the big releases have run the range from outright disasters to merely okay – a new installment seemed like our savior, the Gatsby-esque green light across the bay. Yet the original Bourne trilogy (and, to a lesser extent, the 2012 spin-off The Bourne Legacy) were proof that within that rubric, writers and directors who cared enough could make movies that marshaled the considerable resources of franchise filmmaking, and come up with films that were intelligent, engrossing, and entertaining. They had all the watermarks of soulless product: based (barely) on a beach-read book series, these were big-budget summer action movies fronted by a marquee star, providing a new installment every couple of years to retrace the steps and regenerate the revenue. Here, the action consists mainly of chases, hurtling headlong into unknown territory, and the director's lurching, shaking camera leaves everything an indecipherable, gnarled mess.For the last decade and a half, the Bourne movies were a reliable argument for how the studio blockbuster franchise machine wasn’t completely evil. In the excellent The Bourne Ultimatum, Greengrass took care in establishing the physical surroundings of each action sequence. But in Jason Bourne, both the story and his motivations are more muddled - is he seeking revenge, to shut down the CIA's illicit programs, or both? - and Bourne is much harder to get behind.ĭamon seems to be going through the motions, the other actors seem equally lost or bored, and behind it all, Greengrass turns in some of his sloppiest work. After the Jeremy Renner reboot The Bourne Legacy, star Damon and director Paul Greengrass return for this fifth entry but you have to wonder, why did they even bother, when everyone looks bored? In earlier movies, Damon gave commanding physical performances, using his eyes and expression to take in his surroundings and calculate his next move.