When my friend agreed at the last minute to accompany me on a trip to see Jason Bourne at the Pasadena Arclight, I was elated. There was lingering nostalgia at play as I hold fond memories of watching the Bourne films almost ten years ago on weekends at the Paseo Colorado promenade when it wasn't quite a ghost town yet. It's silly to anyone but me, but the classical architecture and atmosphere of the surrounding area seems scantly reminiscent of the exotic locations where Matt Damon might be evading a multicultural cadre of assassins, all of whom conveniently work for the U.S. government. In short, it was the perfect place for me to enjoy the film. Thus when the long awaited reunion of Damon, director Paul Greengrass and Bourne was finally announced, I'd already decided where I was going to see the movie even if it was five dollars overpriced. It's nearly been a decade, for chrissakes!
I should have known this level of anticipation would inevitably lead to disappointment. The last two long-awaited sequels I enjoyed (Dumb & Dumber To, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) weren't necessarily great films, they were merely better than expected. In a sense, I had little faith that those films would live up to the high marks their predecessors had laid out and therefore I was easier on them. In the case of the Bourne franchise, Greengrass turned what could have been a fluke of an entertaining movie into the smartest action film franchise Hollywood has seen in the past two decades. Not merely continuing but improving upon the original, Greengrass made two sequels that featured intriguing espionage plots and of course thrilling action sequences that never quite went over the top. Bourne films eschew the modern practices of including corny humor or the need to temper explosions with bigger explosions i.e. Michael Bay.
This attention to nuance and balanced sense of theatrics is what precisely made those first three Bourne films age so well (no one even care's about Renner's The Bourne Legacy) and simultaneously they made the fifth installment feel like an unwelcome change of pace. There's no way to recapture the same exact feeling that occurred nine years ago, even if you bring the band back together, so to speak. Perhaps that would have been an unwise ambition anyway, but I couldn't help but be bothered by two centerpiece car chase sequences that felt like the first time Bourne wasn't borderline but completely superhuman. They were indeed longer and louder than the most exciting chases from the original films, but not necessarily more exciting. What makes Bourne such an intriguing action protagonist isn't how he can take down a S.W.A.T. truck with a sports car or survive falling off a building, it was his flair at problem solving which made us yell "Man, that's clever!"There was indeed some of that in the film, including sequences where Bourne expertly evades his pursuers while chasing down his own target in a dense London crowd, or when he found ways to trick both local police and undercover C.I.A. agents in the midst of a violent Greek protest.
Another point that's interesting about the film is just how eerily it reflects the turbulent year in which it was released. It entered principal photography in September 2015, a month before the terror attacks in Paris kicked off a violent year in which the world has seen mass shootings, bombings, violent riots and even a military coup attempt in Turkey. There were a few moments in Jason Bourne which would have simply been your average action sequence nine years ago, but watching Las Vegas security sound alarms over an "active shooter" situation onscreen a mere month and a half after the Orlando shooting drew an uncomfortable parallel. Coupled with the aforementioned protest sequence and a few references to the ubiquitous power of social media, one might say there was indeed an intentional commentary on modern times embedded in the film, though I'm not sure what it is.
Jason Bourne boasts perhaps the most star-studded cast in the franchise yet, with Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander and Vincent Cassel rounding out key roles as the elements trying to catch Bourne with their own veiled motives. Their casting sounds great on paper, and I personally had high expectations as a fan of both Jones and Cassel. Indeed they each turned in great performances, but I couldn't help but think they felt a bit out of place in the Bourne universe. Even as a quietly threatening villain, one can't help but like Jones or expect him to generate some dry humor when he's onscreen. Chalk it up to over-familiarity with Jones' characters. Similarly, Cassel is the most verbose and emotional of the C.I.A. "assets" sent to eliminate Bourne. This was intentional, as the character is written to have a personal vendetta against Bourne but what made the assassins from the original trilogy so intriguing was their cold, detached and way of operating independently from their employers. Vikander holds her own among such talent, but throughout the entire movie I severely doubted the premise that someone so young could rise to such a commanding rank within the agency.
What makes the film is the returning team of Damon and Greengrass. Julia Stiles reprises her role briefly and somewhat blankly, but Damon rises to the challenge of reviving his superhero spy with an impressive energy and his increasing depth as an actor. He doesn't expand on the character, but he doesn't disappoint an audience hungry for the same dizzying standards set fourteen years prior, and that's a remarkable feat in itself. Not once did I get the sense that he was too old to play the part or that he was phoning it in a la Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford. Greengrass similarly lives up to the high standards he set with exotic set pieces spanning from Greece and London to Las Vegas (a first for the franchise) and a mature sense of restraint he only broke for the film's seldom, most intense sequences.
My verdict is that the "mixed" reception it has been receiving is entirely apt. It's not quite as unnecessary as the Jeremy Renner-driven fourth sequel, but I think the risks it took to deviate from what made the original trilogy great ultimately count as failures. It's still leagues greater than anything Michael Bay could ever accomplish and still eclipses the Bourne-inspired Taken series, but at times it verged closer to pedestrian action film conventions than we're used to expecting from Damon and Greengrass. Still, it's not a bad film by any means. I was happy to see it after all these years, but I think the fact that I somehow ended up paying fifteen dollars for it (about three less than the usual Arc Light fare) seemed like an eerily appropriate discount. Good, but not great.
-J
No comments:
Post a Comment