"I Know Who I Am. I Remember Everything..."
After a long and winding nine years since the release of the last "pure" Bourne movie, the one-two success duo of director Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon have once again returned with Jason Bourne, a return to the life of the amnesia stricken black ops operative, who once again is brought back into the spotlight after agreeing to help Julia Stiles' Nicky Parsons in her attempt to leak the entirety of the CIA's black ops programme to the public after turning against her former employees. After the success of the original trilogy, the question remains whether returning the character of Jason Bourne to the big screen was particularly needed and whilst Greengrass's latest is indeed a popcorn ridden action blockbuster with some incredibly well designed set pieces, the familiarity and cliched nature of the plot detracts the quality of the film as a whole and prevents it from being as impressive as its' predecessors.
Nine years on since The Bourne Ultimatum, Bourne has become an outsider, hiding in the dregs of society and earning a living through illegal fighting rings when he is located by former CIA and Treadstone operative Nicky Parsons who speaks of her desire to not only leak confidential information onto the web but to help Jason in his attempts to understand his decision to join the Treadstone program in the first place. Add into the account Tommy Lee Jones' aged and disgruntled CIA director Robert Dewey, Alicia Vikander's Heather Lee, a rookie Cyber Ops agent who is brought in to help bring down Bourne and Vincent Cassel's Blackbriar/Treadstone operative, The Asset, and Jason Bourne covers all the players you would expect from what we have seen in the franchise so far, with Jones clearly filling in the role of Brian Cox from the original trilogy, whilst Vikander and Cassel are simply the latest incarnations of Pamela Landy and The Professor from Supremacy and Identity respectively.
Where the film succeeds is in its' spectacular thrills, ranging from a glorious chase scene through the heart of an austerity demonstration within a destruction-filled Athens, to a climactic final act in Vegas, Jason Bourne only continues and emphasises the meticulous nature of Greengrass's ability in directing set pieces, with the famous "shakey-cam" making reappearing in order to give Jason Bourne that Greengrass touch. If it's plot and originality you seek then the original trilogy will serve you nicely, yet if thrills and stunning action sequences is what you desire in the warm confines of the British summer then Jason Bourne is for you, and although it isn't the masterpiece many would have hoped for, it's still a thrilling enough movie to give credence to the notion of bringing back Bourne in the first place.
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