Jason Bourne

Jason Bourne

Posted on July 28, 2016 at 5:29 pm

Copyright Universal 2016
Copyright Universal 2016

Whoever thought that the “Fast and Furious” series would keep getting better while the once-smart “Bourne” series is the one that drives off a cliff?

During the boring parts of this movie, I played a game I made up that I called “Same or Different.” For example, in one of the earlier Bourne movies, our hero, the once-amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) grabbed a limited-use anonymous cell phone for a particularly clever maneuver. In this one, he grabs a small tracking device handily left out in a bowl like peanuts at a bar for happy hour. Same or different? Different because the first one was plausible and this one was ridiculous.

The earlier films had exceptionally well-staged fight scenes that felt like real people who get out of breath and hurt each other and jockey for advantage. In the first moments of this film, in addition to completely unnecessary jumps between five different locations around the world for no purpose, he knocks out an enormous professional fighter with one punch. Same or different? Same answer as above.  And if we distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys by how much collateral damage they inflict on the world — how many innocent bystanders get killed, the answer here is more same than different.

There are franchise films made for fan service and then there are those that do not even service the fans, are merely a cash grab, and retroactively devalue the franchise.

This is a movie that asks us to believe that the head of the CIA and a Mark Zuckerberg-young titan of the world’s coolest social media company, a sort of cross between Google and Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat, decide to have a conversation of the utmost secrecy in a posh Washington DC restaurant, the kind where everyone eavesdrops on the big shots at the next table, especially reporters, politicians, and Hill staffers.

The first three Bourne films transcended the action/spy genre with a gritty, almost intimate feel far from the glossiness of James Bond, and with an expanding, deepening storyline that, as the then-LA Times critic Manohla Dargis said, began with the existential in “Identity” (Who am I?), extended to the moral in “Supremacy” (What did I do?). With the third film, the question of culpability extended to the larger “I” of the government: Who are we and what have we done? We will put aside for the moment the non-Bourne “Bourne,” which mistakenly went in the direction of a secret government program that was more “Captain America” than Bourne, with a mysterious ability-enhancing drug that removed the somber reality that resonated with the era of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib. There is plenty to explore and attempt to expiate now, and the movie tries to touch on contemporary issues explored in far more compelling — and terrifying — terms in documentaries like Alex Gibney’s “We Steal Secrets” and “Zero Days.” It just doesn’t do anything interesting with them while it is piling improbable motivations and preposterous situations almost as high as the carnage and wrecked cars.

Parents should know that this film has constant spy-related action-style peril and violence, many characters injured and killed including many innocent bystanders, themes of government corruption, and some strong language.

Family discussion: Who should decide the balance between privacy and security and how much information about those decisions should be public? What real-life events inspired this story?

If you like this, try: the other “Bourne” films and “Zero Days”

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Action/Adventure Series/Sequel Spies

Opening This Month: July 2016

Posted on July 1, 2016 at 3:57 pm

Happy July! And welcome to the height of the summer movie season. Today, we kick off the 4th of July weekend with two big movies, Steven Spielberg’s “The BFG,” based on the book by Roald Dahl and starring Oscar-winner Mark Rylance.

And a new version of the classic story with “The Legend of Tarzan,” starring Alexander Skarsgård, Christoph Waltz, and Margot Robbie.

Some of the other highlights of July 2016 at the movies:

July 8

“The Secret Life of Pets” answers the question we all wonder about. What do our dogs, cats, fish, bunnies, reptiles, and other pets do all day while we’re away from home? Voice talent includes Louis CK, Jenny Slate, Kevin Hart, and Eric Stonestreet.

“Life, Animated” is a heartwarming documentary based on the best-selling book about Owen Suskind, a young man with autism whose love for animated films helped him learn how to communicate with his family.

“Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” stars Anna Kendrick, Zac Efron, Adam Devine, and Aubrey Plaza in a wild, raunchy comedy about two brothers who advertise on Craigslist for dates to take to their sister’s wedding.

July 15

“Ghostbusters” Who ya gonna call? In this reboot, it’s Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Kristen Wiig, with Chris Hemsworth as their administrative assistant.

July 22

“Star Trek Beyond” There are a couple of intriguing new names in the credits of this latest in the beloved series. Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty, co-wrote the script. And Justin Linn of the “Fast/Furious” films, takes over as director.

“Ice Age: Collision Course” Pegg stars in this film, too, along with fellow returning cast members Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Keke Palmer, Queen Latifah, and Jennifer Lopez.

July 29

“Jason Bourne” Matt Damon is back as Bourne. I just hope there’s one of those scenes where the CIA boss says he’s in his office and Bourne is all, “No, because then I’d be looking at you.”

“Bad Moms” Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, and Kathryn Hahn decide to stop trying to be perfect moms like that meanie Christina Applegate.

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Opening This Month

Interview: Tony Gilroy, Writer-Director of “The Bourne Legacy”

Posted on August 8, 2012 at 8:00 am

Tony Gilroy, who wrote the Matt Damon “Bourne” movies, takes over as director for chapter four, “The Bourne Legacy,” with Jeremy Renner taking the lead role.  It turns out, as they tell you in the trailer, there was never just one.  And that does not mean just one “Bourne”-like spy.  There was another secret program that has become out of control.  I spoke to Gilroy about the new film.

Tell me a little bit about how this character is different from Jason Bourne.

Aaron Cross is part of a different program, developed by the same sort of mastermind, by Edward Norton and his little agency there. The program is tasked with completely different objectives. The Treadstone program that Jason Bourne was part of was assassinations, they were assassins, it was rather pure and simple. The Outcome program that Aaron Cross is part of is not part of the CIA, it’s sort of been franchised out to the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, and their responsibility is very long-term, submerged, isolated immersion into the most dangerous places on the planet, really, and as warrior spies. There’s a real intelligence aspect of it. So the skillsets are—obviously they have to kick ass, physically, all of the bad-assery is the same—but the personality type and the things they’re looking for are very different, though. The Outcome agents have to have a real, very nimble intelligence, have to be able to be socially flexible, have to be able to blend in, have to be able to have a really high level of curiosity, so it’s a different set up.  And their problems are extremely different. Jason Bourne, obviously as everyone remembers, he wakes up, he has amnesia, he can’t figure out who he is and we basically play his moral quandary for three picture about hoping he was a good person and finding out he’s not and trying to deal with that. Aaron Cross is the opposite of that. He knows exactly where he came from all too well and remembers everything and is just desperate not to return to where he started.

You did a terrific job in casting the film. Tell me about one of my favorite actors, Oscar Isaac.  

No secret, we had a very public search for who would play Aaron Cross.  Jeremy was not available to us for much of that, his name came up very, very late. We looked at a lot of really amazing people over a long period of time. Oscar was a very strong contender at one point for the lead in the movie.  He came in and did just an astonishing audition for us. It was such a great audition that it was really hard to ignore and so we flirted with that idea for a long time and when it came time to make the film there was a very significant part—Character number three, who’s the only other Outcome agent that Aaron Cross meets, and they have a couple of scenes together. I called Jeremy and said, “Hey, no secret, Oscar was a contender for this part, do you have any objection seeing if he’d be interested in coming to play number three?” and Jeremy’s like, “Oh my God, he’s great, bring him.”  It was very exciting to have the two of them in the scenes we had together. Oscar’s just going to be a huge star; he’s a really remarkable actor.

Do you think that the success of these films or the enduring appeal of these films says something about where we are in terms of our lack of trust in large institutions and the government in particular?

We’re playing on that. It doesn’t start off trying to be an issue film. You don’t start off the movie saying, “Oh, we’re going to make a movie about an issue” or “we’re going to have issues in the movie” or “it’s a political movie.” It never begins like that. It really starts first and foremost with the character, and is there something really desperate for the characters involved? Any sort of larger theme is really, really down the line. You hope that there’s something there, but the first important thing is that the characters are alive and really need something. The other part of it is we really need to make—these movies are a ride, this needs to be a two-hour, really exciting adventure, and that’s the twin motivator. Those are the two engines on driving this forward. If you get all that stuff, if you get other stuff in there, it just enriches it. The idea that you can make a movie and people are just on the edge of their seats for the whole two hours, that’s a victory and the extra credit is if you can have people talk about the movie two days later and argue about it or provoke some other conversation. That’s the cherry on top.

I loved the house Rachel Weisz’s character lives in. I thought it told us a lot about who she was. What did you have in mind for the role that the house was going to play in telling the story?

Even in the script, it was a very, very important thing, and it was the location that we struggled the most to find.  We actually found the perfect house, and we fell in love with the perfect house, it was just extraordinary. We walked in and said, “Oh my God, this is just fantastic,” and we thought we were going to be able to shoot there, and it turned out, the house was too fragile to have us work there.  We were in despair and we ended up building it almost inch-to-inch in a variety of ways, I don’t want to get into the whole movie magic of all the things that we did, but we really rebuilt that house. What you said is absolutely true, more than any movie I’ve been on, the house really identifies her character in an extremely economical, visceral way. And then on top of that is the idea that you could have an action sequence play for 10, 12 minutes inside your character’s consciousness in a way.  If the house represents her, the fact that we can have a huge action sequence almost inside the interior life of the character, whose life is in danger, it’s a really cool opportunity, and we knew how much we wanted to get out of it. Kevin Thompson, the production designer, couldn’t be happier with it and the house is really the crowning achievement of a lot of deep work on the movie, a lot of people worked really hard to make that happen.

Do you think there will be other Bourne characters or is Aaron going to continue forward, or what’s going to happen next?

I don’t know! I really don’t know. There hasn’t been any real substantive, concrete, even sideways conversations about what’s exactly going to happen. I think that next Friday the movie is going to come out and we’ll see what audiences say, and that will tell us a lot about who, what, where and when. I think, I hope.

Before I let you go, I have to tell you that every time your first film, The Cutting Edge, comes on TV, I watch it again.

Oh, I know, it’s the gift that keeps on giving, I don’t know what to say about that, it’s a long, weird trip from “The Cutting Edge” through everything else, I’m so happy it’s back there in the beginning. Every time I see Blades of Glory, I get a thrill because…

It’s a tribute!

I’m a big Blades of Glory fan.

Me too! 

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