To be fair, there was walking in the other films, too — lots of it. But it wasn’t
Jason Bourne goes over
Bourne’s contact with Nicky also reveals his whereabouts to a CIA that still considers him a threat. Young operative Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) thinks she can bring him in and turn him, but gruff, corrupt new CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) wants him dead, turning to an assassin referred to as “The Asset” (a mostly silent Vincent Cassel) to find Bourne and do away with him. Dewey has his own reasons to be concerned: He’s got some kind of nefarious surveillance deal cooking with a hot new social-media company run by a charismatic young tech-bro named Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), just the kind of thing Bourne has a history of uncovering.
Anyway, all these threads converge to form a narrative curiously devoid of suspense. Gone are the dribs and drabs of revelations about Bourne and the program that birthed him. The backstory about our hero’s father seems somewhat rote (any twists in it are either predictable or silly) and the conspiracy being unraveled, while topical — with its real-life nods to tech companies colluding with the government to compromise our privacy — feels curiously antiseptic.
The performances are competently unimpressive. Damon is always good at looking quizzical, and the earlier films used that quality to locate a quiet pathos in this otherwise badass character, a questioning vulnerability. Here he just seems puzzled and incurious. Vikander is reduced mostly to just staring at computers and yelling into phones and, yes, walking. (Her character is a computer-surveillance expert, so we get to see her do nifty stuff with facial-recognition software — but that doesn’t require much acting.) Ahmed is a bright spot; he nails the unassuming, performative chumminess of a millennial social-media prophet.
None of that might matter much if the various set pieces could match those of the previous Greengrass/Damon films. But Jason Bourne offers very little in the way of imaginative or innovative standoffs, confrontations or chases. Greengrass helped perfect (and maybe sometimes took too far) the shaky, handheld action style that dominated blockbusters for a few years; his action wasn’t always coherent, but it was always deeply involving — you could feel the bones crack and the cars crunch.
You’d think he could find something to do with such a physical and graceful actor as Cassel, but aside from a late-inning knife-and-cable-fight, the French star is given shockingly little to work with. Nothing here comes close to matching The Bourne Ultimatum’s immortal Paddington Station cellphone-and-sniper showdown, though one stunt involving Bourne falling off a building recalls that earlier film’s jumping-from-one-window-into-another-in-another-building eye-popper.
That’s the thing: Even when it comes to life, Jason Bourne offers very little that could stand on its own; its best scenes remind you of even better ones in the earlier films. There’s a greatest-hits quality to the movie, only the band is tired and its heart isn’t in it. It evokes a sense-memory of the prior films, and if you turn your mind off enough, you might convince yourself that you’re being treated to another action extravaganza along those lines. But really, all you’re left with is the spectacle of great actors walking around with little sense or conviction. The movie leaves you feeling both empty and exhausted.