This is the third film in the cerebral spy series starring Matt Damon as secret-agent-with-amnesia Jason Bourne, with director Paul Greengrass returning, after second film The Bourne Supremacy, to again inject his stylish brand of swift cuts and shaky cam that helped define the feel of the series.
It’s slick, polished, but it has lost character from the second, which had lost character from the original. The filmmakers know what they’re doing, it rattles along confidently and capably, the story beats are where they need to be - with plot elements ossifying into tropes, series cliches - but it’s not fresh and intriguing like the first film.
There’s far less motivation, for a start. Bourne is getting flashbacks to his birth as a shadowy CIA operative, and wants to uncover the truth of who he is, how he came into being. Despite the closure presented by the previous film, with CIA bad apple Brian Cox flushed out and brought to light, the agency, now personified in David Straitharn’s Deputy Director Noah Vosen, isn’t ready to give Bourne a pass. “As far as I’m concerned,” Vosen declares in an early expositional scene in Langley, “Bourne is still a threat until proven otherwise.”
And so they’re right back at it. Bourne racing and ducking around a handful of global locales - London, Madrid, Tangier, New York - looking for answers, using his mouse-like powers of evasion, while the big clumsy cats of the CIA hunt him with all their gadgets and intel and manpower.
Bourne has an early cohort in Paddy Considine’s Guardian reporter, which, like, if you were going to make a mood board of Bourne films, the Guardian’s masthead would be right up there, along with the Eurostar, the Berlin public transport system, and a beat-up boxy old Citroen or something, to define the iconography of the series. As a fully paid-up Guardian supporter, I’m fine with this.
Joan Allen is back as Pam Landy, the sympathetic voice of reason inside the CIA, again stern and fair and unwilling to kowtow to the powerful men around her. She argues with Vosen, stands her ground, sounds great while doing so. But she’s got less to do this time out, and sadly Julia Stiles, the only other woman on the cast, has an even less active role, relegated to pouting at Bourne’s war wounds and cutting her hair to look like his dead girlfriend. No, the film doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.
It does look fantastic, again, though. Washed out day scenes, moody, lugubrious night scenes, lots of greens and blues and oranges and yellows, continuing the tone from where the previous film left off. Greengrass knows what he’s doing with action, filming movement and pace and excitement, with the overall emotional impression given precedent over any clear details. Cars crash, windows smash, bullets zip, bodies roll, and you don’t have time to think about each event, you’re just caught up in the ride. You always know who has the upper hand, what the micro goals are, how they’re being achieved - you know the story of the action - but pause and consider what you just watched and you realise it’s pretty dumb.
Dialogue follows a similar approach, zinging back and forth, forcing plot transitions, but not meaning a hell of a lot if you stop to analyse.
And this is maybe the film’s biggest weakness. It just doesn’t have the heart of the first film, the soul, the core. It ticks the boxes, goes through the motions, and does so probably the most capably of the three, but in essence its existence is predicated upon the thought: “people liked this thing, let’s give them more of this thing”, rather than a drive to make something inherently intriguing and worthwhile. The story is not a story worth telling, when taken on its own merits, but simply an engineered excuse for the audience to have more of the bits they enjoyed the first two times. Which, yeah: sequels. But that’s why sequels are bullshit. Never give people what they think they want. Give them what they could never imagine.
There’s a late car chase, feeling forced and overblown, and then a rushed conclusion, and then we’re thrown into that iconic Moby track, the credits roll, and the trilogy is over, with, despite the noise and agility, more of a whimper than a bang. The Bourne Momentum, is the name I’d give to this one, with all the strength of the first outing being enough to slide the franchise through two sequels, just about to the end of this one, but with the momentum used up and no more thrust added.
After this they waited five years, then tried a different tack with The Bourne Legacy. I'll watch that next week, and report back.
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Music: Mother, by IDLES. Aggressive, activist indie punk from Bristol. Brazen and bold, it asserts its intent, does its thing, and gets out. Good stuff.
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Music: Mother, by IDLES. Aggressive, activist indie punk from Bristol. Brazen and bold, it asserts its intent, does its thing, and gets out. Good stuff.
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