I thought the Jason Bourne franchise was done when the fourth installment, starring Jeremy Renner, Ed Norton, and Rachel Weiss, went off the rails by turning the spies into chemically engineered super-soldiers not too different from a gritty, juiced-up version of Captain America. I disliked Bourne Legacy so much that I went home and watched the original three movies the following afternoon.
Jason Bourne, the fifth installment featuring the return of Matt Damon and Julia Stiles, was not that bad, but it was a far shade paler than the first film. There, we are given these touching moments of character development where Bourne starts to stitch together his identity with the help of Maria (Franka Potente). There are long moments where no one is punched, and the audience comes to care about Bourne and root for his redemption.
All of that is gone. The movie is a cobbled together messy of action shots spliced with people looking aghast in disbelief that they are again tracking Bourne in relation to some sort of black-ops logistical nightmare. All the standard tropes of the Bourne franchise are there: grizzle old man with no regard for ethics or laws, an upstart woman who sees the good in Bourne (and the badness of those around him), a woman who can speak to Bourne and tame his feverish nightmares, an killer asset who speaks little and kills without remorse, a car-chase scene filled with a Keystone-Cop-esque police pursuit, and even a fight scene where the assailant has a knife and Bourne kicks his ass with a house hold item (this time a pot inexplicably found in a drainage canal). In the end, this felt more like a clips show, TV's version of a Greatest Hits album, than an actual movie, but they certainly left it open for a sixth one. Maybe that will just be several steady-cam shots of Bourne appearing behind people without saying anything.
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