Jason Bourne is the 5th installment in the Jason Bourne franchise, and is a direct sequel to third movie, “Bourne Ultimatum”. Matt Damon reprises his role as the amnesiac suffering CIA assassin looking to fill in the pieces of his professional and personal life. In this installment, its ten years later since he walked away from the CIA, yet little to nothing is told about what he’s been doing these past ten years, except that he’s been staying off the grid and kicking ass in underground bare knuckle boxing matches. Bourne is quickly brought back into the fold by his friend Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), after she hacks into confidential CIA files and discovers foul play in the black ops programs that Bourne was recruited into, which of course, is enough for Jason Bourne to jump right into the action.
I tried really hard to like this movie, I really did. It was all so very expositional. I did appreciate Damon’s performance as Jason Bourne though, and amazingly enough, he only had 25 lines of dialogue in the entire movie. Although the rest of the performances in Jason Bourne were well played (Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Riz Ahmed), their characters as written, were simply flat and in most cases, terribly predictable. And how about all those high octane action scenes that make for incredibly convincing trailers in promoting the film? Simply put, they were difficult to follow and at times, nauseating. These scenes were bombarded with a barrage of milli-second shots, fast cuts and way over used dizzying, handheld shots, that when assembled together, just made it extremely difficult for me to follow, nonetheless engage in. Outside of the numerous action sequences, what plagues this movie most, is that instead of showing the audience the story and letting it be revealed and unfold on screen, the characters in the movie talked about the story, and that’s a recipe for a good play, not a good movie. The only emotional investment for the audience was watching Matt Damon do so much with so very little dialogue. And that’s it for this reviewer. I suppose one of the tricks to making a good franchise movie is, to keep it fresh and engaging for the audience, and all Jason Bourne offers is a rehashing of the same story, with very little to no emotional attachment to any part of this movie. I’m sorry, but I really did try to like this movie.