Day 109: Flogging a dead horse until it's Bourne again

Well I'm home after a close-open and I've done nothing this evening even moderately worthy of blogging about save watching the latest Bourne film, snappily titled Jason Bourne - because, you know, nothing says your franchise has run out of steam like releasing an ostensibly back-to-basics sequel announcing its intention to return to form via a stark, unadorned title - see: Fast and Furious, Rocky Balboa, The Predator, etc. etc. - and of course the film won't truly be a return to form, it'll be a dumb sequel like all the others, but naming it in such a way allows you to flog one more box-office return from the dead horse before you bury it for good. Or you reboot the franchise and start again. Or write a prequel explaining how the alien ship that no one cares about got onto the planet that no one remembers. Or you create an expanded universe tying your franchise to many other franchises. And Hollywood marches on.

Well, anyway, want to know what I thought of Jason Bourne?

I thought it was utter crap. Formulaic, paint-by-numbers dross. The first two Bournes were frenetic, no-nonsense European thrillers, slick and gritty and hip, hearty antidotes to the adolescent silliness of James Bond. Spy films not for 13-year-olds, but for... well, 16-year-olds. The thinking teen's spy film.

But Jason Bourne takes what could generously be described as the series' common elements and turns them into tired tropes, each existing with no internal logic or greater meaning beyond ticking off the hallowed checklist of Things All Bourne Films Must Contain.

So you've got your vulnerable potential sidekick who's killed off early on (spoilers), robbing Bourne of anyone with whom he could have formed an emotional connection. You've got your FBI or CIA or whatever director embroiled in nefarious schemes protecting a top-secret agency initiative.

Is there an assassin with preternatural abilities comparable to Bourne's own, referred to by the agency only as "the asset", brought it when bungling agents fail to get the job done, you ask? You bloody bet your sexy bum there is.

And how about a structure whereby Bourne is always a step ahead of the agency in every situation, except when the asset comes into play, which forces Bourne onto the back foot, until just as it looks like the agency has Bourne cornered it turns out his plan was an extra step ahead of them all along? Wow, you're good at this!

And if you guessed there's a female analyst character who realises Bourne isn't a baby-eater and comes over to his side when he needs her the most, and an interminable punch-up between Bourne and the asset, with both utilising makeshift weapons scavenged from the environment, and flashback scenes where shadowy memories from Bourne's past come back to haunt him, and a car chase where all the windows of the cars smash and the bonnets accordion and the bodywork crumples - if you've guessed all that then gold medals and meringues all round, because you sir or madam are right on the money.

That car chase: the asset, after being thwarted by Bourne, sneaks out of an expo centre while the cops are looking for him and into the fleeing crowds. Then this highly trained secret operative decides his best chance of escape is to knife a soldier in the back and steal a SWAT van, and he careens off into downtown Las Vegas with cop cars and helicopters and searchlights after him, as Bourne steals a Dodge Charger or something I think they said (I don't know cars) which was waiting with its keys in the ignition and obviously wasn't product placement paid for by Dodge (or whomever), and there the SWAT van is smashing into traffic and ramming cruisers, there's Bourne ragging it after him - and the scene ends up reminiscent of nothing so much as the inevitable conclusion to every play session of Grand Theft Auto ever, after you've got bored of the story missions and structure and everything and you decide to just steal the biggest vehicle you can find and smash through waves of police, shooting your Uzi out of the window, trying to hold out as long as you can before you're taken down in a blaze of glory, which takedown you don't end up minding so much because tea is almost ready and you're getting a headache and all this nonsense is a bit immature in honesty anyway.

That's Jason Bourne all over. An energetic shaky-cam dash through a plot that at heart is as nonsensical as any videogame, sticking to not just genre but franchise conventions with religious rigidity, falling eventually apart into noise and idiocy, as if everyone involved has realised their tea is ready and they're too old to still be doing this.

That chase scene culminates in Bourne and the asset wailing on each other in the moody shadows of a storm drain, back and forth, back and forth, two old men once possessed of killer instincts, now lacking the energy to finish the other off.

There's a metaphor for the entire series there somewhere, but it's too late at night for me to be able to quite find it, so all I'll say is that this film is so dumb that it literally has a character yell out a version of the "zoom and enhance" trope as if it wasn't the lamest plot device in all of screenwriting.

What a load of pish.