They know exactly which elements it has to have in order to distinguish it from every other espionage thriller on the market. Greengrass and Damon (and, to a lesser extent, Liman), have done a positively scientific job of refining the Bourne-movie formula. Partly, it’s a simple matter of the law of diminishing returns. Once you’ve seen Bourne barrelling through crowds of protesters and riot police in a city choked by smoke and tear gas, you’ll never be able to rewatch 007’s daft car chase in Spectre, through a conveniently deserted Rome, without smirking.īut even when Jason Bourne has you on the edge of your seat, it’s still hard to shake the feeling that it isn’t as satisfying as the earlier films. Just to show the copycats how it’s done, he puts the film’s first extended set piece in the middle of an anti-government demonstration in Athens - and the confidence with which he orchestrates the chaos is astounding. Greengrass’s hectic, immersive style has been much imitated since The Bourne Supremacy rewrote the rules of the secret-agent genre in 2004, but no one else has his ability to construct a fight sequence that is so head-spinningly fast and fragmentary, but which is also possible to follow.
And once again, Greengrass stages the action with bone-jarring immediacy, using wobbly handheld cameras and rat-a-tat editing to make the viewer feel as if they could be hit by a stray fist or bullet at any moment.
Once again, he is never more than half-a-step ahead of his enemies. Once again, Bourne hurtles from one grey and gritty European metropolis to another at breathtaking speed. He believes that Bourne should be dispatched by an assassin known only as The Asset (Vincent Cassel, who is an asset indeed), whereas his shrewd lieutenant (Alicia Vikander) argues that Bourne can be persuaded to rejoin the Agency.
Bourne is intrigued enough to investigate further, but his enquiries upset the CIA’s director (Tommy Lee Jones, providing the air of elder-statesman gravitas and deviousness that Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, David Strathairn and Albert Finney brought to prior instalments). The fact that the viewer gets to see an alarmingly muscular Damon with his top off is, I’m sure, an unintended bonus.Īt any rate, Bourne’s anonymous existence is interrupted when his old CIA buddy Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) tracks him down to share some new information about his murky past. It’s disappointing that he hasn’t made more productive use of his phenomenal skills, but the idea is that he was traumatised by his time as a brainwashed black-ops killer. Since we last saw him, Bourne has been living off the grid as a bare-knuckle boxer.
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