Jason Bourne: A Review

JASON BOURNE

A myth of sorts has been built around the reason for the failure of The Bourne Legacy.  So, the story goes, the reason Legacy failed was because the character of Jason Bourne was not actually in The Bourne Legacy.  The Bourne Legacy was attempting to build a franchise around a character without said character actually being there.  In a bit of course correction, Jason Bourne brings back original Bourne Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass in an effort to rebuild the old series and restore its own mythic story. 

Bless them for trying, but Jason Bourne proves the theory about The Bourne Legacy wrong: the character of Jason Bourne can be in a Bourne film...and still fail.

A plot recap is a bit tricky, given a.) how convoluted a lot of things were in the beginning, and b.) how Jason Bourne asks that you know or remember a lot of what happened in The Bourne Identity/Supremacy/Ultimatum.   I'll give it a try nonetheless.

Jason Bourne (Damon) is in the international version of Fight Club, brawling throughout Europe to make money/forget/remember what happened to him, having flashbacks every now and again.  The CIA would still like to grab him, but from what I see does not make it a top priority.  That is until Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) downloads more nefarious material from Langley, including information about Jason's father who may have had a deeper hand into Jason's assassin ways.

Talk about The Bourne Legacy!

CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) is apoplectic about this breach, and wants both Bourne and Parsons terminated.  The CIA officer who both discovered the breech and is the tope expert on cyber-security, Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) would rather get them captured, convinced that Bourne can be brought back into the fold. Enter Asset (Vincent Cassel), master assassin whom Dewey entrusts to finding and exterminating the meddlesome Bourne and Parsons.

In the chaos of a violent Greek protest, Asset manages to kill Parsons (as a side note, despite how she is not the star she was before, I figure Stiles is happy not to have to come back to any future Bourne films), but unsurprisingly fails to kill Bourne.  It's a globe-hopping tour as Bourne continues to attempt to discover the truth about his father, who was killed in Beirut, as well as expose another CIA operation, Iron Hand.

Dewey has also made a secret deal with Mark Zuckerberg-like social network billionaire Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed).  Kalloor is publicly all about Internet privacy, but privately has given Dewey access to his user's information in exchange for financial assistance in starting his company, Deep Dreams.  Kalloor wants out of his deal, going so far as to threaten to go public.  Those words are like waving a red flag at a bull, and Dewey now plots to get at Kalloor too.

Jason Bourne finds an unlikely ally in Lee (the new hoped-for series' Nicky Parsons), who also distrusts Dewey.  She has been given the go-ahead to try and take him in London, but Dewey secretly tells Asset to exterminate all those who get in his way of killing Bourne (except for the dupe Lee).  Despite his best efforts, Asset is unable to get at Bourne himself, and now Bourne meets with Lee personally, and she gives him information about Dewey's next plan, which will take place in Las Vegas.

It's off to Vegas to get at Dewey and bring him down.  Dewey has plotted to go all-Manchurian Candidate and have Kalloor assassinated while giving a talk at an Internet expo, with Dewey taking a bullet to make it look good.  The CIA becomes aware that Bourne has shown up, and that he has had some kind of help from the inside.  In a rage, Dewey orders Asset to assassinate Kalloor and Lee, but Bourne gets in the way.  Eventually, it is Lee who kills Dewey while saving Bourne, and Bourne then gives chase to Asset through the Vegas Strip for an ultimate showdown.

In the aftermath of all this, Lee rises higher, but Bourne still does not trust her.  He lets her know this by playing a recording he made of her secret conversation with the new CIA head, where she urges them to try to bring him back, and if that fails, to kill him.

I learned that Henry Cavill had a total of Forty-Three lines of dialogue in Batman vs. Superman: Yawn of Justice.  Some reports have Matt Damon outdoing this by stating he has a mere TWENTY-FIVE lines of dialogue in Jason Bourne.  If I go by the report in Vulture, that's erroneous: Damon has Forty-Five lines of dialogue, outdoing Cavill by a mere two.

I can tell you that I figure the Vulture count is closer to the truth, as Damon has, from the time he first actually meets Lee in London to the final scene, exactly...TWENTY lines total.  Granted, I started counting pretty near the third act, but even by Bourne standards, this taciturn portrayal, like the film itself, veers dangerously towards parody.

As a side note, I can understand why Cavill was given as few lines as possible: reason being he cannot actually act so it was best to minimize the damage (though he'd make a great silent film star).  Damon, however, can act, so the fact that Greengrass, who co-wrote the screenplay with Christopher Rouse, made Bourne into a very silent figure must have been a deliberate decision.

More so when you remember Damon is a producer of Jason Bourne.

As in The Bourne Legacy, the character of Jason Bourne appears to be a non-entity, a plot device to get things going.  So much time is spent on the battle between Dewey and Lee, on Asset's machinations/assassinations, and even on Dewey v. Kalloor that one wonders if THAT was the reason Jason Bourne stayed quiet for long stretches.

I haven't seen Ex Machina or The Danish Girl (for which Vikander won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, the latter film unseen because Eddie Redmayne tried to "drag" his way to a second Oscar for himself after that shameless mechanical performance in The Theory of Nothing, but I digress).  I cannot therefore, say how good an actress Vikander is, but she must have been better in those than in Jason Bourne, for few CIA agents can come across as so dull and lifeless.

Actually, I can make some kind of judgment on Vikander, having seen (but not yet reviewed) The Light Between Oceans, and after seeing that, I begin to despair as to what kind of actress she is.  I also forgot she was in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., but then again most of the world has forgotten that horror too, so I can't be blamed for finding her forgettable. 

Jones could do this kind of role in his sleep (and at times I suspect he was asleep).  As for Damon, well, he too did what was hard to imagine: make Jason Bourne a rather dull fellow.

There were a few good pieces in Jason Bourne.  The Athens riot sequence was a bright spot, and the closing sequence in Las Vegas, while at times wildly over-the-top, was also I thought a highlight.  Pity that Greengrass decided to double down on the chaotic shaky-cam and wildly gyrating camera that made things harder to follow (or harder than they already were given how the plot didn't help you sort things out for a while).

Jason Bourne, like Matt Damon, is starting to show his age.  Perhaps they think by making something that comes close to spoofing itself they will get more Bourne films.  Perhaps it is time to let this spy stay out in the cold.      

DECISION: D+

The Bourne Legacy: A Review (Review #450)

THE BOURNE LEGACY

You're Either Bourne with It...

The Bourne Legacy is a most curious film in that it is neither a remake of any of the Bourne Trilogy (Identity, Supremacy, and/or Ultimatum) nor is it, strictly speaking, either a sequel or prequel to any of them. The Bourne Legacy doesn't want you to forget that it ties in (somehow) the original trilogy, yet it wants to be its own film (maybe even the first in a series of new adventures) at the same time.  It really is asking the audience to do two things simultaneously: to be judged on its own merits while being seen as part of a larger story.  This slightly schizophrenic take on the subject hampers The Bourne Legacy on both fronts, leading to a slightly confused, slightly crazed product, never settling on what exactly it wants to be.

The film literally jumps around between two apparently unrelated stories.  The first is the various machinations of the government, in particular Eric Bryer (Edward Norton) and Mark Turso (Stacey Keach), who appear determined (not precisely sure about what, but boy do they look serious). The other is some guy out in the Alaskan woods, who has finally found his way to the cabin he was supposed to be at.  At this cabin our hero, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) and his minder (Oscar Isaac) are slowly warming up to each other when, unbeknown to them, Bryer and Turso decide that all the Outcomes (agents that received the Bourne medical treatment: a blue and green pill) have to be eliminated.  Well, they're given one last pill and they drop dead.

For Cross and Outcome #3, a more extreme method is used: the cabin they're in is blown up by a drone.  Cross was conveniently outside, and after said drone chases him, Cross manages to deceive it into blowing up a wolf.  Now he has to find a supply of pills to stay alive...I think.  That's where Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz) comes in.  She works in the lab that produces said pills, and has survived a bizarre workplace shooting, which might be related to all these machinations.  In any case, Shearing is rescued by Cross and now they have to get to Manila to get more of these pills (even if Cross, which isn't his real name we learn, doesn't need the green pills for physical perfection since it's now ingrained into his body, but needs the blue to maintain his intelligence).  The bad guys trace them there and there's a chase and they escape, perhaps to fight another day...    

The biggest problem with The Bourne Legacy is that Jason Bourne is both in it and not in it at the same time. His presence haunts the film, like some ghost who won't get exorcised out of a home because it is what brings in all the tourists.  Director Tony Gilroy (who co-wrote the script with Dan Gilroy) should have some idea of the world of Bourne, but the decision to keep mentioning Bourne, showing his picture, bringing in actors from the previous films, didn't serve either Legacy or add to anything people might remember from the Damon films.  What it ironically did was make Renner's Aaron Cross almost a secondary character in his story.  Despite the best efforts of Renner, it's Jason Bourne, not Aaron Cross, that appears to dominate The Bourne Legacy, even if he isn't in the film.

Gilroy made one mistake after another.  There was this focus on Jason Bourne (right down to bringing in characters from the trilogy whom we may or may not remember, such as Joan Allen's Pam Landy for a cameo).  There was this long, long, LONG set-up before Aaron Cross even spoke any lines (as well as to why we should care about this strange woodsman roaming around Alaska).  Even worse, those scenes were intercut with those in Washington where the 'evil' men are doing 'evil' things.  You know they are connected, but it never plays as if the Washington and Alaska stories tie in together until well into Legacy.  Add to that one more bad decision: to bring in the extermination of the various Outcomes: they're just thrown in there for a few seconds then killed off.  Given that we have little idea who they are their deaths, which should be shocking, don't register because we've never been given reason to care. 

One wonders why Gilroy wasted so much time giving his Cross' physical prowess and Bryce's wickedness when he could have just set things up with the Outcomes earlier and more importantly, faster.  ANOTHER bad decision was to introduce the fact that Byer and Cross knew each other almost past the middle of Legacy.  Byer knows of Cross, but Legacy never made it clear if Cross knew Byer was behind the attempts to kill him.  Moreover, why put that in if the adversaries will never actually confront each other (unless that is being held back for a hoped-for sequel)?

Structurally, Legacy is a mess.  We're made to sit through a long intro where very little to nothing happens.  In the place of anything called 'character development' or 'plot', we're treated to endless scenes of people looking serious and speaking in somber tones.  This I imagine suggests that we have to regard whatever they're talking about with great solemnity but it doesn't so much leave us out of things than give us room to actually care.  Worse off, when the Shearing and Cross stories finally come together, it almost seems like they were rammed from two different projects in order to save money.

As I kept watching Legacy, waiting for something to happen (and to be fair, a few things did happen, but more on that later), I kept getting the sense that Jeremy Renner should fire his people.  It's not so much that he can't handle the action scenes (which he can, though not with any sense of spectacular bravado that either Damon or his Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol co-star Tom Cruise can) or even that he couldn't handle the softer moments (though again, the Gilroys script gave him little to latch onto).  It's that I keep getting the sense that Renner is being pushed into being an action star rather than an actor when he isn't an action star or even a draw. 

Renner is much better than his material, but it doesn't help when he scowls throughout the film.  Weisz doesn't appear to know what to do with this doctor who isn't interesting and whom we don't care about.  Norton looks intense, but a little sliver of me would have loved for him to have gone all-Hulk to go against Hawkeye. 

Now THAT would have perked up the movie intensely.

I don't think I can dismiss one or two good things in The Bourne Legacy.  The action sequence where Shearing is attacked and rescued at her home was actually quite good and surprising, and the Manila chase scene, while not as good as it could have been (especially by throwing in some last-minute henchman who pops out of nowhere, we're never introduced to, we don't see as an actual menace, and who is eliminated before the credits roll), did on occasion provide some genuine thrills (as when Weisz comes dangerously close to falling off the motorbike).

It's unfortunate that Gilroy wasted so much time and talent into a story that doesn't move.  It doesn't want to commit to being its own film apart from the Bourne Trilogy.  It goes back and forth: inserting Jason Bourne and those he worked with while trying desperately to convince us that The Bourne Legacy is a new start of adventures.  The film is disjointed, confused about itself, and not much of anything.  

Apart from those two action scenes The Bourne Legacy is more The Bored Legacy.              

DECISION: D-