Review of Jason Bourne (2016) by Ben L — 18 Sep 2016

This return to the Bourne franchise is more of the same, but this time without a halfway decent plot. Since I kind of hate both Paul Greengrass Bourne movies, seeing more of the same was enough to make me furious walking out of the theater. The shaky cam is back and more obnoxious than ever. You cannot track what is going on in any of the action scenes, but even worse you can't even follow the slower moments. There were static scenes around a conference table where a character's face would bob around the screen so erratically that it would seem the cinematographer was doing jumping jacks while filming, and there are so many close-ups it becomes laughably noticeable. There was one scene where I swear I could have counted Tommy Lee Jones' nose hairs except they were moving from the left side of the screen to the right and then up and then down. The funniest moment was when they expected us to read something on the screen and they seemingly had to use CGI just to show us words that weren't blurred by the motion. Add to the shakiness all of the quick cuts on action and you have a film that is impossible to actually enjoy even if you remember to take your Dramamine. But some people tolerate this crap, I mean Greengrass has made a few of these movies already and they do make money. Some people even call it a legitimate artistic style of film-making, so this isn't what will turn off fans of the series.

What should turn you away is the script. When Jason Bourne isn't blatantly copying all the story beats from the original trilogy, it breaks off into a subplot that makes no logical sense. So you have plot #1 (Bourne starts to remember the death of his father and realizes there might have been more to that event than meets the eye) and plot #2 (The CIA is potentially going to utilize a hugely popular app in order to spy on Americans.) The sad reality is that there is zero connective tissue between these two stories. Yet somehow both are going on at the same time, and we're supposed to understand why Bourne is getting involved in #2 when all he cared about was #1. It's not that difficult, people! The connection to Bourne's past was completely unnecessary, because we know Bourne has been burned by these spy organizations before. So all we needed was for him to fight back because it's the right thing to do. Don't invent some loose connection to still unremembered events from his past! It's like the script-writers thought the thing people liked about the Bourne trilogy was forgetfulness and flashbacks. There are a lot of other little things that make no sense in the plot, and tons of lazy script shortcuts that just seemed to be thrown together for the convenience of keeping the story going.

Jason Bourne includes the same stereotypical cast of characters, who you could easily correlate one-to-one with people from the trilogy. At this point they have almost become a parody of what once worked. Tommy Lee Jones plays a CIA director without even a hint of propriety. Alicia Vikander is the intelligent woman who is trying to catch Bourne, but might also sympathize with him. (She also somehow gets computers to do magic, which irritates me in a film series that was usually more grounded in reality.) Vincent Cassel is the assassin assigned to kill Bourne who comes with a personal vendetta. This character has become such a cliche that they don't even bother giving him a codename or anything, he's literally credited as "Asset." Julia Stiles is in here too, but she didn't get much to do. Her performance left something to be desired, as though she could tell just how bad this movie was going to be. Lastly, I'll mention the top-billed guy who spoke less than all 4 of these other people I listed. I swear Matt Damon literally doesn't say a word until almost 30 minutes have passed. He offers plenty of serious face emotionless acting, which was fine because the movie certainly didn't elicit any emotion from the audience either (other than anger from people like me.) Jason Bourne is a disastrous attempt to cash in one more time on a franchise that either needed to up the ante or change significantly. It did neither, so I would tell everyone (even fans of the Bourne franchise) to avoid it.