Jason Bourne is the same old, same old

The latest instalment in the Bourne series is a trip down memory lane, but a jaded one

The British have James Bond, a suave ladykiller who knows his way around a gun and prefers a “shaken, not stirred” martini. He fights his way through picturesque locations looking as handsome as he can.

But his American counterpart, who also happens to have the same initials, is a far cry from Bond. Jason Bourne doesn’t have swanky cars or beautiful women on his arm. He doesn’t fix his cuff and dust his suit after a fight — maybe because he doesn’t own one. And he also suffers from amnesia. But what has lured fans to the theatres — ever since the first film, The Bourne Identity, released in 2004 — is that Bourne is more relatable.  

And after almost a decade, the newest instalment, Jason Bourne, is out.

Matt Damon reprises his role as the amnesiac secret agent. The film also stars Tommy Lee Jones, Julia Stiles, Vincent Cassel, Alicia Vikander and Riz Ahmed and is directed by Paul Greengrass, his third after he took over from Doug Liman and made The Bourne Supremacy.

The film is set much after Matt Damon swims away to Moby’s “Extreme Ways” in The Bourne Ultimatum. We have our hero indulge in street fights on the Greek-Macedonian border. He is off the grid, hiding and lonely.

But then Nicky (Stiles) comes along and Bourne plunges into the very life he was running away from. She wants to expose more details about the Treadstone project — in order to avoid temporary amnesia, like our hero, it’s recommended to rewatch the Bourne trilogy first. This leads to Bourne popping up on the CIA’s radar again. And this time Jones personifies the “supreme power” in the form of Robert Dewey.

A still from the movie Jason Bourne

Since Dewey is the bad guy, he uses CIA agent Heather Lee (Vikander) and an assassin called Asset (Cassel) to prevent himself from being exposed. Dewey wants to keep his involvement with Aaron Kalloor (Ahmed) under the wraps. Kalloor is a tech innovator and heads Deep Dream, a company that deals with providing absolute privacy, but is in cohorts with the CIA and helps the agency to keep tabs on the citizens. Now, Bourne has to expose Dewey, without getting killed in the process.  

Since cyber-security is the name of the game these days, the film makers haven’t wasted any time to portray it on screen. And if you think the Deep Dream part vaguely reminds you of Snowden, it should. The film does drop Snowden’s name many times.

Having seen Vincent Cassel in Black Swan and Ocean’s Twelve, I was expecting a great Asset the assassin, but my frustration knew no bounds when I saw what Greengrass reduced him to. Ahmed, on the other hand, outshines even Matt Damon. He plays the role of Kalloor with urgency and fear. Anyone who has seen Four Lions  or The Reluctant Fundamentalist knows how well Ahmed slips into a character’s mould and this film is proof of that.

Damon plays the complex character well but seems off in quite a lot of scenes. He has few dialogues and had it not been for the title, one would think he’s not the protagonist. Jones, too, seems disinterested. Stiles manages to keep you interested but Vikander is just a pretty face in the film.

The film is nostalgic but in a bad way; there is nothing new here. Jason Bourne has the same premise as the first three films — something bad is under wraps and he being a good citizen needs to expose it. It has the same character types: the main bad guy, a woman character that helps our superspy and an assassin. Clive Owen’s Professor in The Bourne Identity and Vincent Cassel’s Asset in this one are the same — both assassins and both actors were underutilised.

But Moby should be delighted — “Extreme Ways” might become the most watched song on YouTube, after almost a decade.