The steady decline of the Bourne franchise continues unabated with this fourth installment, which sees Matt Damon’s eponymous hero replaced by similarly hench yet likeable stud Jeremy Renner, for a two-hour parade around worn motifs and action thriller tropes.
The motivations are clear, yet surface deep. After Bourne’s antics in previous films, the shadowy organisations from which he has been running decide to shut down their programmes, killing off their operatives and covering their tracks. Renner’s Aaron Cross is one such operative, who survives the assassination attempt, and must then… well, run away. It’s as simple as that, really.
Unlike Bourne, Cross is pharmacologically enhanced, and needs his little green and blue pills every day to keep his senses preternaturally honed. Thus he must not just disappear, but go find a new supply, which brings him back within reach of the agencies hunting him. And then there’s a scientist, Dr Marta Shearing, played by Rachel Weisz, who has been studying the effects of the drugs on the operatives, and she also survives the clean up operation, and is then thrown together with Cross, and the two of them sneak into facilities, run away from local police, escape hit men on motorbikes, and do all that stuff that heroes and audience-surrogate characters do together.
The moments of action are well filmed, and there’s nothing egregious about any of it, the actors, which group also includes Ed Norton as the get-stuff-done mission commander for the agency, all put in strong performances, the set pieces are thrilling, and the directorial style by series writer Tony Gilroy, toning down the shaky cam excesses of Paul Greengrass’s work on Bournes 2 and 3, retains the urgency while providing more clarity - but the series is pretty much in the weeds by now.
Gone is that brilliant hero’s journey from the original, which essentially found a way to externalise tension between the yearnings of the inner self and the pressures of the outer other into a kickass spy thriller - that’s been forgotten, as has the grounded action, the relatable protagonist, and in its place is a moderately successful but generic action film.
The pacing is off as well. Individual scenes work well, but the flow of the overall narrative doesn’t feel right. It’s an hour into the two-hour film before Cross and Shearing link up and Ed Norton’s team begin hunting them - and it’s 1h15m before we have the requirements of Cross vis-a-vis his daily drug dosage explained to us. That should be baked into the script far earlier, its repercussions explored through the unfolding narrative - as it is the drug dependence only exists to provide motivation for visiting one locale, and then an anticipated scene where Cross gets dizzy and loses focus and has flashbacks to his time as a recruit, right as, in the present moment, Shearing needs him most. Its tangential, and easily resolved, and thus provides little peril or opportunity to burrow to the core of Cross’s character.
And then it’s not until the film’s climax when a counter asset, a test subject for a new programme even more advanced than the one from which Cross has escaped, which agency bosses assumed was still in the planning phase, is called into play. This trope of the antagonistic asset worked in the first film, when played matter-of-factly by Clive Owen. He was the shadow-self archetype, the dark brother, and he provided a great sense of mounting pressure and approaching conflict as the noose tightened around Bourne. By this film the concept is dog-tired and dull, a cliche shorn of its original vitality.
And that’s the general feeling of the film. It’s not bad, but it’s empty of whatever spark initially lit the franchise. Jeremy Renner does as well as can be expected, though he’s never given room for Cross to become much more than the soldier at the peak of fitness he is when we first see him.
The final chase scene is fun. Everything rumbles to a sufficiently satisfying conclusion. But it’s a far cry from the heights of the original. Better than 2016’s execrable Jason Bourne, though. At least you can say that about it.
And now I really am done with left-wing spy films championing individualism in the face of state control. Think I'm going to watch Roma next week, and hopefully won't leave it so late. I can but hope.
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Music: He War, by Cat Power.
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