Bourne franchise delivers the action we expect, but story fails to satisfy

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/07/2016 (3691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

American super-spy Jason Bourne may share the vocation and initials of James Bond. But it was never in the cards that the hero, who originally sprang from the pulp pages of author Robert Ludlum, was ever going to be a perpetual movie generator in the same way Bond was.

In a way, it had its own success to blame. The story of an amnesiac agent (Matt Damon) learning the truth of his own past was satisfactorily covered in the trilogy of Bourne movies — The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). A 2012 spinoff, The Bourne Legacy, starred Jeremy Renner as a similarly trained super-agent deemed expendable in the wake of Jason Bourne’s one-man rebellion. It was better than anyone had a right to expect, but was ultimately a placeholder movie, a wheel-spinner in which you could almost hear on the soundtrack the studio drumming its fingers waiting for Matt Damon to return to the franchise.

Jason Bourne, directed by Supremacy/Ultimatum helmer Paul Greengrass, fills that bill in a rather naked attempt to push the original plotline beyond its natural trilogy parameters.

In a plot turn that seems lifted from a subpar 1980s action movie, we find Damon stoically playing the loner hero on the bum in Greece, using his martial arts prowess to earn a few bucks on the underground fighting circuit.

Meanwhile in Iceland, Bourne’s compromised CIA comrade Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), now working in the employ of an Edward Snowden-like whistleblower, hacks her way into an undiscovered Bourne file. She flies to Greece to hand it over to the troubled ex-spy amidst the backdrop of a riot in the Greek capital.

Given the government agency’s capacity to track anybody, that doesn’t exactly go smoothly. But Bourne does learn about the file, which holds a startling revelation having to do with his past before he even signed up with the sinister spy-factory program known as Treadstone.

All the while, Bourne is being tracked by an inscrutable CIA operative Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), a woman who may or may not be entirely loyal to CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) on his own mission to compromise the security system of a Mark Zuckerberg-esque Internet mogul (Riz Ahmed). With a ruthless CIA assassin (Vincent Cassel) in play, the action moves to Las Vegas for a destructive rampage that proves more unsettling than amazing in the wake of a couple of recent incidents — one of them in Vegas — where a vehicle was used as a weapon.

Greengrass has been rightly celebrated for the subjective, almost intimate way he creates action scenes that are almost disconcertingly realistic compared to pre-Daniel Craig Bond movies. (This franchise left as much an imprint on the Bond movies as the reverse.) Greengrass delivers the beats and beatdowns fans expect.

But without the story arc of the original trilogy, it all feels gratuitous. This is a movie that seeks to indulge an audience hungry for a specific style of action, as opposed to serving a compelling narrative.

There should be a word for that. How about “Bourne-ographic?”

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing