That’s not to say that the screenplay by Christopher Rouse and Paul Greengrass doesn’t attempt to give him some reason to put aside his restless wandering from one illegal street fight to another meet up with old ally Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) who has uncovered some new information on Bourne’s induction into the Treadstone program and a disturbing link to his long-dead father.īut while it is, on the surface, a compelling reason to put on the old avenging gloves again, it simply doesn’t carry enough heft to sustain the narrative all the way through the film which ends up being a series of full-bore action scenes spread across the cities of the world such as Berlin, London and Las Vegas.Īs far as a general spy thriller goes, Jason Bourne is perfectly serviceable, high-octane fun with just enough substance, or attempted substance, to make it worth plonking your money down at the box office.īut even though all the boxes are ticked, many of which Bourne was responsible for bringing to the table in a genre that had grown tired and imaginative, the film leaves you with the feeling you have seen it all before. In other words, in Jason Bourne, he has gone from genre upsetting character on the make to the old hand with few secrets and not much left to reveal. He was the ultimate Good Guy, albeit one corrupted by powers beyond his control, up against a neverending stream of shadowy intelligence figures who couldn’t hope to compete with Bourne’s mix of toughness and emotional woundedness.Īnd yet 10 years after what was presented as the conclusion of his journey in The Bourne Ultimatum, which his sense of self was restored sufficiently to allow him to walk away from a fight he never asked for, there is a good chance we now know Bourne a little too well.
This has meant that unlike other characters who come to us largely fully-formed, Bourne was a work-in-progress that you couldn’t help but sympathise with, root for and champion at every turn. In fact, such has been our collective journey with Jason Bourne, played superbly by Matt Damon with the right mix of toughness and vulnerability, and directed by Paul Greengrass, that we viscerally lived every step in his quest to find out who he was and to enact justice against those shadowy figures in the CIA and the wider US Government who had stripped him of his identity in order to serve the “greater good”. The tagline for Jason Bourne is the definitive yet poetic “You know his name”, an evocative phrase designed to speak to our familiarity with a character who, over the course of three genre-redefining films that caused among other Bond to play visual and narrative catch-up, we had come to know every well.
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