JASON BOURNE: ReTreadstone

Director: Paul Greengrass
Writers: Paul Greengrass, Christopher Rouse
Cast: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed, Ato Essandoh
Runtime: 123 mins.
2016

You were the best of friends with this guy. Over the course of the half-decade-plus when you were in direct contact with him, he always proved a reliable companion, and your bond only grew stronger as you shared new experiences over the years. Eventually you had to part ways. You both knew that no matter how much you intended to keep in touch with each other, life was dragging both of you down separate paths--and that was for the best! You revisited his memory every so often, remembered the good times, but that's it. You've met people like him since, but without the exact balance of charisma and savvy that made him special. You've moved on.

But lo and behold, you'll be in the same area as each other this summer, so of course you plan a visit. You know it won't be like it was, but at the very least you expect to fall into some old nostalgic patterns that would not be sustainable long term, but are gratifying, pleasant, and perhaps even healthy in the moment. Although you have other things more prominent on your mind, you look forward to this meeting. Then you see him, and he's kind of... a shell of his former self. In the intervening years, life has run your old friend ragged. His signature personality quirks are muted to the point of banality, and all of his mediocre traits have spread and taken over. The worst thing that could have happened to this kind of friend has happened. He has become dull.

Such is the experience of watching Jason Bourne, most recent in Hollywood's current Sisyphean trend of perpetual reboots. Having earned the ill will of fans with their 2012 Jeremy Renner-helmed sequel The Bourne Legacy, Universal has desperately scrambled to get the band back together. In this case the band consists of Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, Paul Greengrass directing, John Powell* scoring, and Christopher Rouse editing (plus picking up a screenwriting credit this time), among others. One must be dubious of naked cash grab reboots, but that's a lot of talent. Besides, a movie like this can survive a less than great reboot so long as it delivers on the basic promises of the series in a somewhat satisfying way.

*As best I can tell, Powell is the only individual who contributes really good work to this film.


Jason Bourne never comes close to good enough. The Bourne Trilogy is a high watermark for action cinema in the 21st century. The Greengrass sequels revolutionized the medium with their impressionistic editing (though nobody else has managed to replicate the success of that technique), and even the "worst" entry in that trilogy, Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity, is a tight thriller paced like a boulder rolling downhill.

The plot of Jason Bourne is hardly worth recapping, as it is the same as any other Jason Bourne movie. The long and short of it is that Bourne has retired to a life of beating the hell out of prizefighters in Greece, when Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) busts in on his business with a lead on new information about Treadstone and Bourne's murky past. Treadstone is the secret super soldier program that created Bourne, which we now find out has something to do with Bourne's father. Meanwhile in CIA, everyone freaks out about Bourne being active again. They send an assassin known only as The Asset (Vincent Cassel) to bring him in or take him out. This time the faces of the CIA are Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) and upstart digital crimes maven Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander).

I'm hard-pressed to remember any other plot elements, so I'm gonna say that's all there is to it. Which isn't in and of itself a bad thing. Identity in particular was elegant in its simplicity. The issue is that everything surrounding the plot in Jason Bourne is underwhelming, which makes the simplicity feel more like simplemindedness.

First of all, the themes are a mess. The Bourne Trilogy earned the moniker of the brainy action thriller with good reason. It explored core post-9/11 issues without flinching, but also without foregrounding them beyond all reach of subtlety. In some craven attempt to imitate the political relevance of those films, Jason Bourne grasps at privacy issues in social media as its source of intrigue. This takes the form of a subplot in which tech giant Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed) tries not to give into Director Dewey's demands about turning over the information contained in his successful social media program, Deep Dream. This thread is facile and hardly ever crosses over with Bourne's violent shenanigans, which makes it feel tangential as well.

Not helping the dimwitted vibe of this movie is the way it presents information onscreen. The other films had a way of implying important plot points without spelling them out for us, so as to avoid delivering details in momentum-sucking exposition drops. As such, the CIA scenes were always brief, snappy, and more about the psychologies of the bureaucrats than anything else. Here we get Tommy Lee Jones expounding dryly on the film's plot mechanics, often prompted by some simple outburst from his sidekick Craig Jeffers (Ato Essandoh), a character with the misfortune of having very few lines, as well as a significant portion of the worst dialogue in the film. Here is a sampler of things ole Craig might say:

-My God, that's Jason Bourne.
-This could be worse than Snowden.
-Wait. There. A blonde. Enhance!

The feeling of being spoonfed grows with the sense that the actual spy business in this movie is a ten-year-old's conception of spy business. A character asks, "Did you hack the third firewall yet?" and there is a shot of a slowly progressing loading bar labeled "Firewall 3." Inserts of secret files openly deliver exposition about Bourne's father on their covers.** A character lights a computer on fire after she finishes hacking it. Bourne finds a thumb drive that is physically labeled ENCRYPTED. Come on. This is supposed to be Bourne, not Adam West's Batman.

**Another subplot that has absolutely no place in this movie.

Not helping the overall sheen of laziness are the performers. They are absolutely dealt a garbage hand by the screenplay, but not an unsalvageable one, especially in a pared down thriller like this. Yet nobody gives the appearance of wanting to be there. Jones is a professional, and he doesn't phone it in, yet there is a distinct lack of imagination in his character. He is simply Tommy Lee Jones, bossing people around like Tommy Lee Jones does. Meanwhile, Alicia Vikander, who won a 2015 academy award for one movie and should have won for another, takes a messy character who could have been dimensionalized with some finesse, and totally flattens her into an unknowable cipher. The actions she takes are unexpected, but only because we don't have enough access to her psychology to make predictions about her motivations. She slathers on a baffling accent to make it all go down rougher. Finally, and most disappointingly, this film features the worst Matt Damon performance I have seen. His perplexed everyman charisma typically carries these movies, but here he is one note to a fault. He certainly looks the part, grizzled and aged in the years since Ultimatum. But at no point does he commit to doing anything but frowning through this film, displaying no interest or investment in the deaths of those around him, or the information that he learns. The film ends with Bourne playing a dope prank on one of the CIA characters, and it just seems silly and petty.

Of course, everyone checking out of this movie must trace back to Greengrass himself being checked out. He brings his old Shakycam tricks with him, but it feels subdued and obligatory. One of the crowning achievements of the originals was their pacing, which is all haphazard here. The action isn't even that great. At one point I felt relief when a tedious action scene petered out and transitioned into another talky CIA scene, even though I wasn't particularly enjoying that either. The one exception to this is the climax of the film, which features a few moments in which I perked up and recognized a shadow of the old Bourne. I'm thinking especially of the sequence featured prominently in the ads in which an armored car plows through Las Vegas traffic. That is a moment you could tell the filmmakers were proud of.

Those moments are incredibly rare. Months ago I was surprised at the announcement of this film's profoundly unimaginative title, especially considering the cool naming conceit they had followed thusfar, but it makes much more sense considering the blase feel of the movie. It's almost like Greengrass is using the title to try to communicate his pain to us. Or at least his boredom. If I had any doubt that Greengrass and Damon had no desire to return to this world, it was eroded with this tonedeaf quote from Universal Pictures chairwoman Donna Langley:

Even though Matt and Paul had been very definitive about not wanting to come back, we weren't really willing to submit to that. . . look, here's what I think the goal is: to keep Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass doing Bourne movies till they can't do them anymore.

Thus Jason Bourne becomes an ouroboric commentary on the making of Jason Bourne. A hypertalented man keeps being dragged into affairs he wants nothing to do with by heartless bureaucratic agents who insist that he is still relevant. This purgatorial struggle finds Jason Bourne years later, and forces him to once again play their game. Yet this time he adopts a workmanlike attitude towards the entire proceedings, seeming to care little about the journey, because the outcome will invariably be the same.

2 / 5  BLOBS