Matt Damon as Jason Bourne
“JASON BOURNE” My rating: C+
123 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
It’s good to see Matt Damon back in action.
“Jason Bourne” marks his return to the renegade spy franchise after sitting out 2012’s “The Bourne Legacy” (in which Jeremy Renner played a fellow super assassin).
But let’s get real: This installment is less a continuation of the saga than a recycling of stuff we’ve already seen.
To say it’s superficial is giving it too much credit.
Writer/director Paul Greengrass (who helmed Nos. 2 and 3 in the series, “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum”) doesn’t even make a token effort at original plotting or character development. Nobody in this film has an inner life.
What he concentrates on to the exclusion of all else is movement.
The film is one long chase around the globe (Greece, Iceland, D.C., Berlin, London, Las Vegas) captured in jittery handheld camerawork and rapid-fire cutting. Is there one shot here that runs for as much as five seconds? Don’t think so.
At first it’s exciting. The movie radiates energy like a pubescent boy on a three-day Red Bull binge.
After a while it becomes numbing.
We encounter our fugitive hero on the Greece/Turkey border, where he has a gig as a street fighter. Basically he beats up other pugilists for money. It’s ugly work, but it keeps Bourne off the grid.
Enter former CIA agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), who has turned on her former employers and has now discovered evidence of the origins of the Treadstone superspy program — including a revelation about the crucial role played by Bourne’s late father.
But back in Virginia, CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, looking ever more like a 3-D topographical map of Arizona) is on the hunt for our man. Dewey is putting the final touches on a sixth-generation version of Treadstone and doesn’t want a wild card like Jason Bourneout there to spill the beans.
He employs the talents of cyber analyst Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) to track down Bourne. Soon Heather comes to believe that maybe Bourne isn’t such a bad guy after all (although her long game is hard to pin down).
But Bourne still must contend with another assassin, known only as “The Asset” (Vincent Cassel), who carries his own grudge against our hero.
Oh, yeah … there’s a brief subplot about a social media mogul (Riz Ahmed) who has allowed his Facebook-ish platform to be used by the CIA for info data searches. As if the internet didn’t already generate enough paranoia.
“Jason Bourne” boasts two Oscar-winning actors (Jones and Vikander) and a multiple nominee (Damon, whose only win is as a screenwriter), but gives them next to nothing to do. Jones snarls, Vikander broods and Damon kicks bootie. And that’s about it.
The high points of “Jason Bourne” are three big action sequences. One is a motorcycle ride through a rioting mob outside the Greek Parliament in Athens. Another is a foot chase through London.
And finally there’s a motorized rampage down the Strip in Las Vegas that sends cars spinning and flipping like gigantic tops.
They’re exciting for the sheer kinetic energy on display. But at the same time they’re incomprehensible — half the time you can’t be sure who or what you’re looking at.
What we’ve got here is less a movie than a two-hour action sequence … and for many viewers that will be enough.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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