Plot points for Jason Bourne discussed below, but none that haven’t been revealed in trailers or ads (which reveal kind of a lot).
Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) looks old. Or maybe weathered is a more appropriate term: his skin tone matches the desolate, sandy camp in which we see him first. He’s been traveling the backwaters of Europe winning bare-knuckle boxing bouts with one-punch power, like a spec-ops Pikey. He is punishing himself for his sins, and trying to regain the memories his government took from him and set right his wrongs.
The wear in his face feels all the more jarring when we see flashbacks to the first three films in the Bourne series, as well as some new scenes that clearly utilize Hollywood’s magical de-aging algorithms to show us Bourne with his father shortly before his death. It’s these few moments—Bourne Senior is blown up in front of Bourne Junior in order to convince Bourne Junior to erase all memories of Bourne Senior and kill lots of terrorists for the CIA—that serve as the Rosetta Stone for the mystery of "Jason Bourne."
But what if it wasn’t terrorists who killed Papa Bourne after all?
Jason Bourne sometimes feels like an extended effort to absolve Jason Bourne of all wrongdoing. Bourne is the sort of hero that the American left wants to love: He’s opposed to the American government’s efforts to kill terrorists and influence international affairs, more concerned with CIA misdeeds than suicide bombers. But it’s not enough that he is atoning for these sins; to truly free his spirit, we need to learn that his original sin—signing up to be a killer in the first place—is predicated upon a lie.
Bourne is brought back into the fray by Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), a one-time CIA operative now working for Christian Dassault (Vinzenz Kiefer). Dassault (pronounced Doo-so) is a WikiLeaks-style hacker trying to let the world know of the CIA’s nefarious plots; Parsons hopes she can convince Bourne to get back in the game (of destroying American national security) by showing him files that prove his entry into the TREADSTONE program was a lie.
Meanwhile, CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Agency’s head of digital Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) are trying to track down Parsons and Bourne, as well as convince Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), the head of a Facebook-like social media company, to give them access to all his site’s user data. There is much talk of a Project IRONHAND—worse than BLACKBRIAR, we are told in ominous tones—but little discussion of what the project actually, you know, involves.
As the first three Bourne films reflected liberal angst over the George W. Bush administration’s secrecy in waging the war on terror, so too does Jason Bourne try to tackle today’s anxieties. Bourne and Parsons meet in the midst of an anti-globalization protest in Greece, and the aforementioned hacker, who hisses—hand to heart, hisses, like a German-accented snake—to Bourne the following bit of on-the-nose silliness: "We bothhh want to take down the corrupt insssstitussssshuns that control ssssssoccccciety."
More tone-deaf is the attempt later in the film by the CIA to pin an assassination on a fake "lone wolf" terrorist. Given the near-daily terror attacks in Europe by Muslim terrorists—priests with their throats cut, trucks mowing down civilians—and our own ISIS-inspired-murderers here in America, I think it’s safe to say that the average American is less concerned about Tommy Lee Jones reading your Facebook messages than a Jihadi with a rifle taking out a preschool.
That aside, Jason Bourne is entertaining enough, an action-packed paranoid thriller that clocks in at a trim two hours. Director Paul Greengrass’ native style—which resembles a hacker on Surge, the camera jerking here and there, zooming in and zooming out when something flashy catches his eye—is put to fitting use. Damon remains a surprisingly credible action star, and it’s always nice to see Jones onscreen.
Vikander, who I generally like a great deal, feels miscast. More distracting than her ridiculous, out-of-place beauty is her inability to maintain an American accent: I spent much of the film trying to figure out why the CIA would hire a Scotswoman, itself an annoying diversion, since Vikander is actually Swedish.