Review of Jason Bourne (2016) by Nikolayg — 28 Jul 2016

Eh, it was OK. You might want to wait and rent it. My expectations of home rentals are lower, so if you're like me in that way, you'll enjoy it more at home. When you actually go out, park somewhere, stand in line, pay for a ticket, and stand in line again to pay for overpriced popcorn, then sit with someone's head partly in the way, you expect more for your trouble.

The best Bourne movies for me are the first one and the 4th one, the one Bourne isn't even in. This one is on par with 3 but maybe not as good as 2. The problem I had with this is that, look, I know I'm not going to get tons of character development, but in place of that I at least want a plot with revelations and twists and turns.

But you get none of that here. You just get a simple excuse for a plot with 3 or 4 words of dialogue once in a while to push the thin plot onward, but 99% of the movie is insane action, and in this case the camerawork was so close up all the time that it was disorienting and a little nausea inducing like the Blair Witch Project.

The Blair Witch Project promoters liked to brag that viewers were throwing up in the theater - which suggested the movie was incredibly gross and frightening - but in fact people were puking because the camera work was hand-held and looking at the ground half the time and jiggling and bumping all over so that people got sea sick.

Jason Bourne isn't that bad visually but it's pretty bad. Handheld cameras and close shots even during action are fine as a tool in the toolbox to use here and there to get very intense, to highlight a climactic, moment, but when you do it all the time it becomes just a meaningless blur, and that was kind of what you had here.

That said, the acting, what there was of it, was good. Perhaps I give it a 6 rather than a 4 or 3 simply because I've seen the previous Bournes so I knew what I was in for when I entered the theater. I'm calibrating it against other Bourne movies rather than against other action movies generally.