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JASON BOURNE
Directed by Paul Greengrass, Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed, Ato Essandoh, Scott Shepherd, Bill Camp, Vinzene Kiefer and Stephen Kunken.
REVIEW: Todd McCarthy
UP UNTIL a narratively implausible and logistically ridiculous climactic motorcycle chase through Vegas that feels like a sop to the Fast & Furious crowd, Jason Bourne is an engrossing re-immersion in the violent and mysterious world of Matt Damon’s shadowy secret op.
With director Paul Greengrass compulsively cutting the almost incessant action to the absolute bone in his trademark fashion and some solid new characters stirred in, Universal’s franchise refresher should have no problem being re-embraced by long-time series fans nine years on (not counting the lukewarm non-Damon stopgap The Bourne Legacy in 2012).
Even though The Bourne Ultimatum theoretically resolved the root issues driving title character’s distinctive identity crisis, Greengrass and his co-screenwriter Christopher Rouse now neatly re-position him as still in need of a little clarification and guidance in life. In fact, Bourne’s fortunes have now declined precipitously, as he’s first glimpsed in rough rural Greece engaging in bare-knuckle fighting for pocket money. He’s still tough but, as the traces of gray hair attest, he won’t survive too much longer on brawn alone.
As if anxious to serve up the first virtuoso action set-piece, Greengrass and Rouse quickly set the table back at Langley: New CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) has a keen young analyst, Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who has located Bourne’s long-ago contact Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) and rightly suspects that she has gone over to the other side in possession of a top secret file.
For the better part of the next half-hour, the film bristles with visceral excitement. As Bourne and Parsons rendezvous in Athens, Dewey’s hired French assassin (cheekily named “Asset” and played with fierce menace by Vincent Cassel) pursues them through crowds of protestors that are moving through nocturnal streets, waving banners and pushing matters closer to the edge of violence.
From a stylistic point of view, this long sequence represents Greengrass at his visceral, impressionistic best: The seething movement and sense of incipient chaos seem less like choreography than action painting, with one potent, elusive image replacing the last as in a jagged-edged, constantly shifting jigsaw puzzle. The result is much like what you might remember if you experienced such an unnerving event in real life; it captures indelible moments and images rather than a full and coherent picture of it.
The upshot is that the relentless “Asset” manages to accomplish just half of his job; it’s Bourne, of course, who gets away, with a file that supposedly reveals Black Ops secrets going way back, including the dirty secret about who killed Bourne’s father many years earlier.
So everyone’s motives are firmly established: Heather wants to earn her stripes by being the one to finally bring Bourne in from the cold, Dewey needs to protect CIA secrets at all costs and Bourne, beyond surviving, is finally within reach of learning the truth once and for all.
But yet another intriguing new character has been added to the ensemble, that being Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed, star of HBO’s The Night Of), a young king of Silicon Valley who, up to now, has played ball with Dewey in exchange for the latter’s help in establishing his start-up. Now, however, Kalloor feels the need to assure his 1.5 billion users that his Deep Dream platform will not allow the government in any under any circumstances, a move Dewey in no way appreciates.
Notwithstanding Dewey’s promise to allow the ambitious Heather one shot at lassoing Bourne, the relentless “Asset” continues to hunt his prey, now in London. A long pursuit sequence through the city’s gleaming new business district repeats many of the familiar moves, with characters darting quickly through crowds, from vulnerability to fleeting safety, with technology always in play and some resultant fatalities; it is, nonetheless, reliably tense.
The action’s final 40 minutes play out in Las Vegas, where the most anticipated event of a big tech convention is a Deep Dream symposium at which Kalloor and Dewey are to debate the contentious topic of web security vs. national security. With ace sharpshooter Asset on the loose, shadows of The Manchurian Candidate begin to loom over the big public event, especially as the CIA director has by now proven himself to be dependably duplicitous.
To be sure, something happens to provoke widespread pandemonium and public panic, but the big action climax, a slam-bang speed race through a jam-packed nocturnal Strip, is as preposterous and incoherently staged as the Athens opening is striking and convincing.
Not only that, but Asset’s reckless behaviour seems totally out of character here in light of the instinct for self-preservation he’s heretofore always exhibited.
Unfortunately, then, the film ends on a flat, unimpressive note, as well as with the realisation that, no matter how much time we’ve spent with them, the characters remain utterly one-dimensional. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter