‘Jason Bourne’ feels like a letdown for such a big-budget action film

When is it time to put down a great franchise? That’s the question that comes to mind when watching “Jason Bourne,” the fifth installment of the Bourne movie dynasty.

It’s not that the movie isn’t exciting. It’s an incredibly slick and tense thriller, with a great leading man (yes, Matt Damon is back after a one film hiatus), a top-notch supporting cast (Oscar winners Tommy Lee Jones and Alicia Vikander), and spectacular stunts and car chases throughout.

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But we’ve seen it all before. Four times before. I guess the question is, should that matter?

Lest we forget, so successful were the initial Bourne films (especially The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy) that they momentarily displaced the James Bond franchise as the go-to action series for moviegoers (Daniel Craig’s more rough-and-tumble Bond was reportedly influenced by the success of Jason Bourne).

The brilliance of the series is that it married a complicated, amnesiac hero with dazzling and visceral in-your-face action set-pieces.

Over the course of all these films, however, Jason Bourne has gradually come to learn an awful lot about his mysterious past — that he was part of a secret CIA operation, that his identity was wiped out in order to turn him into a cold-blooded assassin, that the CIA now wants him eliminated, and that he’s had to “go rogue” just to save himself from being assassinated.

The franchise is now having to repeat itself rather often and inventing more backstory for Bourne to uncover.

“Remembering everything doesn’t mean you know everything,” Bourne is told. That’s the key line that justifies, or at least tries to justify, the existence of a fifth film.
Bourne finally can remember everything about his past but he doesn’t know everything about the context of his past, and that gives the movie its raison d’etre. Unfortunately, what he doesn’t know, as we eventually find out, is not that surprising, or revelatory, or necessary to know.

The movie still succeeds at the level of a big-budget action movie: three major car/motorcycle chases, including a stunning one on the Vegas Strip that involves a SWAT armored vehicle that plows its way through dozens and dozens and dozens of cars, a few great stunts, and countless shoot-outs and fistfights that are as tense as they are brutal.

That would be enough for most Hollywood action films, I suppose, but for this franchise, it definitely feels like a letdown.

I say it’s time to bring Jason Bourne in from the cold once and for all before the audience forgets why they were so intrigued with him in the first place.