Having made a triumphant trilogy of thrillers in "The Bourne Identity" (2002), "The Bourne Supremacy" (2004), and "The Bourne Ultimatum" (2007), Matt Damon announced that he was moving on. He joked that if he ever returned to the character of the rogue CIA assassin, the film should be called "The Bourne Redundancy."
It was a good hunch. The fifth entry in the series (following Jeremy Renner's much-scoffed sidebar spinoff "The Bourne Legacy") is as exciting as a carbon copy produced by a clone.
In its effort to bring the story into the modern world of Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks, with illegal domestic surveillance and privacy rights locked in a death struggle, "Jason Bourne" hops around the globe and across inessential subplots. Its narrative hopscotch loses the tight personal focus that made its antihero so compelling, and saps the cinematic urgency that made the earlier movies so robust.
Despite some action sequences that are poetry in motion, and a high-profile cast teaming Damon with fellow Oscar winners Alicia Vikander and Tommy Lee Jones, it feels like an average celluloid spy film at best.
We meet Bourne here still physically astounding after a decade of living solo off the grid. Tense as ever, he pays for his tiny flat in the European hinterlands by flattening rivals in gamblers' fistfights, punching them like Popeye after a can of spinach. Returning director Paul Greengrass revives his shaky-cam technique for a jittery, quasi-documentary feel, but the rousing you-are-there feeling has evaporated.
From the opening brawls to brutal unarmed combat between Bourne and rival spies, the handheld approach here appears forced and implausible.
Bourne's amnesia still causes painful flashbacks. But he has abandoned his goal of exposing the truth of the CIA programming project that turned him from ordinary agent into superhuman superspy. "I remember everything," he says, and that's enough trauma. Then his old ally Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) shows up in Athens with newly hacked information regarding his recruitment and the death of his father. The chase is on (and on and on) with the CIA determined to bring Bourne in or bring him down at any cost.
The story widens as the agency's scowling director Robert Dewey (Jones) and ambitious cyber analyst Heather Lee (Vikander) link Bourne's pursuit to another enemy of their bureau. Aaron Kalloor (future "Star Wars" star Riz Ahmed), a Mark Zuckerberg-like internet billionaire, aims to limit their unlimited surveillance powers on his billions of users.
That sort of makes sense. Much of the film is devoted to speed typing beside computer screens, smartphones and GPS maps. It's also an interesting echo of the recent standoff between Apple and the FBI over issues of privacy, but it is not exciting.
Damon's work as Bourne is cyber-baggage, too. He speaks perhaps two dozen short sentences over two hours, the sort of communication you can fit in a few posts on Twitter. The film's repeated passages of him grimacing and walking at a brisk pace through crowded train stations and airports are more thrilling, though not by much.
Greengrass, scripting with his longtime editor Christopher Rouse (who won a deserved Oscar for "Ultimatum"), is leagues behind the sharp screenplay Tony Gilroy has given the series from the beginning. They move us beyond the shadowy spy program Treadstone to the supposedly scarier Iron Hand, but never light the scary fuse. They introduce the Asset, an assassin Bourne must elude, but provide almost no details about why he is so vengefully eager to kill his target. Vincent Cassel, reliably fascinating to watch, barely scratches below the surface of the personality-free role, wrenching against the steering wheels of zooming vehicles and staring villainously in the eyepiece of his high-tech rifle.
The film's most intriguing point is its politically charged subtext. The chaos opens in a Molotov-throwing mass riot outside the Greek parliament and ends with a car-smashing race across the Las Vegas Strip. Beginning in the birthplace of democracy and concluding where it is living out its current late stage, "Jason Bourne" appears to be saying something about our cultural decline. If that's the real implication, the conclusion should have happened in Hollywood.
