2016, Movies

Jason Bourne (2016, Paul Greengrass)

Why there’s another Bourne movie I don’t know. This one hits all the marks you’d expect: Bourne is mad at the CIA and is taking some kind of action, there’s someone on inside helping him out. (Actually 2 people, but whatever.) The cast is too good for the material, as is usual with these films, and Greengrass does a good job with a plot that gets dumber and dumber as it goes on.

SPOILERS!

Remember when the Bourne movies were an antidote to ridiculous spy movies? I do. And I wish that if the series was going to be revived, the people making these movies would remember it too. Instead, Jones’ character, the fucking director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is speaking directly with an assassin, all the time. He hires this assassin to shoot a famous person in a public place! Then, he pulls a gun on Bourne! Yes, spy movies are ridiculous, but they should at least attempt to be based in some kind of recognizable reality. The director of the CIA is not a spy, he is a bureaucrat. That is something the Jeremy Renner version of this franchise got right (though it didn’t get much else right) and this movie misses completely. Bureaucrats are not spies so stop telling me they are.

4/10

  • Directed by Paul Greengrass
  • Produced by Paul Greengrass, Matt Damon, Frank Marshall, Jeffrey M. Weiner, Ben Smith, Gregory Goodman
  • Written by Paul Greengrass, Christopher Rouse, Based on Characters by Robert Ludlum
  • Starring
    • Matt Damon as Jason Bourne
    • Tommy Lee Jones as Robert Dewey, the current director of the CIA
    • Alicia Vikander as Heather Lee, head of the CIA Cyber Ops Division
    • Vincent Cassel as The Asset, a Blackbriar assassin working for the Iron Hand program
    • Julia Stiles as Nicky Parsons, Bourne’s former Treadstone contact in Paris whom he sent into hiding in The Bourne Ultimatum.
    • Riz Ahmed as Aaron Kalloor, CEO and founder of Deep Dream, a social media enterprise
    • Ato Essandoh as Craig Jeffers, a CIA agent and Dewey’s right-hand man
    • Scott Shepherd as Edwin Russell, Director of National Intelligence
    • Bill Camp as Malcolm Smith, a former CIA analyst who retired to the private sector
    • Vinzenz Kiefer as Christian Dassault, a hacker, whistleblower, and the leader of a group of privacy activists
    • Gregg Henry as Richard Webb, Jason Bourne’s father and creator of the original Treadstone program
    • Stephen Kunken as Baumen, a Deep Dream employee
  • Music by John Powell, David Buckley
  • Cinematography by Barry Ackroyd
  • Edited by Christopher Rouse
  • Production companies: Perfect World Pictures, Kennedy/Marshall, Captivate Entertainment,Pearl Street
  • Distributed by Universal Pictures
  • Release date: July 11, 201
  • Running time: 123 minutes

    Country: United States

    Language: English

    Budget: $120 million

    Box office: $415.5 million

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