Jason Bourne
Director: Paul Greengrass
Stars: Matt Damon, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Tommy Lee Jones
Three stars
Bourne is back, and this time it’s for real, with Matt Damon back in action as the world’s favourite rogue CIA black-ops agent.
This is his fourth outing in the role, nine years after we last saw him in 2007's The Bourne Ultimatum. In between, we had 2012's The Bourne Legacy, which sought to pass the franchise on to a new generation led by Jeremy Renner as new character Aaron Cross, to lukewarm reviews.
And so Damon returns as Bourne, still living off the grid and hiding from his former CIA employers, whose corrupt practices and conspiracies he had tried to expose.
He’s now ekeing out a miserable existence as a bare-knuckle boxer in the Greek/Albanian borderlands. All that changes when an old friend turns up with information about a dark family secret from Bourne’s past – and so he once again finds himself lining up against his former masters as he tries to learn more about who he really is.
The shadow of Edward Snowden looms large over this instalment, with its emphasis on the morality of CIA data-gathering techniques and the surveillance of ordinary citizens – the real-life whisleblower is namechecked more than once.
If the extent and sophistication of surveillance carried out by the organisation in the movie is anywhere close to reality, we should all be terrified.
Rapper-turned-actor Riz Ahmed (The Night Of) shows up, too, as a Mark Zuckerberg-like character whose hugely popular social media site has been infiltrated by the spymasters – but fans needn't be concerned, the movie doesn't spend too much time debating ethics and online privacy as it flits raucously from one car chase or fight scene to the next.
Dialogue and intricate exposition have never been part of the Bourne appeal, and this movie carries on that tradition. The action sequences are broken up by moody shots of Bourne gazing into the distance, rather than delivering extended monologues on the issues.
This is basically classic Bourne – big, blustery and dumb, but thrillingly entertaining as he takes on the might of a corrupt CIA director, played by Tommy Lee Jones; Vincent Cassel’s Asset, a CIA assassin with a personal grudge of his own; and Alicia Vikander’s CIA tech wizard Heather Lee, whose motives remain unclear until the very end.
The plot has a few holes – it is strange, for example, that despite all the high-tech surveillance on show, the time-honoured wear-a-baseball-cap trick still makes you invisible in a hotel crawling with CIA agents – and at just over two hours, the movie perhaps overstays its welcome by at least one car chase.
However, fans of the franchise won’t be disappointed.
• Jason Bourne is in UAE cinemas from July 28
cnewbould@thenational.ae
