Movie Jibber-Jabber vol.7: "Jason Bourne,"

Movie Jibber-Jabber is The Film Yap’s new digest column – your one-stop week-in-review of film news and commentary, as well as a preview of what we have to look forward to over the next few weeks.

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Review: Jason Bourne

Jason Bourne was an action hero for the 2000's – a pioneering return to grit and “realism,” for what it's worth. He was post-9/11 American action therapy. His self-disgust at his own capacity for violence speaks to the era. “The Bourne Identity,” is still the best of them, but its sequels - “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” - are essential viewing that give Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) a compelling character arc. Spoilers: we eventually learn that Bourne chose to be a hyper-lethal assassin on his own free will. His sense of moral deniability is ultimately rendered naut. Sure, he still gets the shadowy government bad-guys, but he learns that he is fully culpable in his violent decisions. So were we. It's fun to see violence, particularly in the spy genre, as something necessary and detached - “Bourne” was uncanny in bringing it home, not just in a naval-gazing way but in a way that used the conspiracy thriller tropes to ultimately say something interesting about our own needs and expectations of violent retribution. It was truly of its time.

“Jason Bourne,” the fifth movie in the series (the fourth with Matt Damon & director Paul Greengrass), and it sucks. In so many ways. It isn't just the action sequences, which feel like imitations of the aesthetic it brought to the table over a decade ago. It isn't just the plotting, which is about as laborious as you can get in a new action sequence. It's isn't just the complete ruination of Jason Bourne as a character. It is that, unlike other venerable spy franchises – like “James Bond,” which had its own Bourne-knockoff era – the character of Bourne is broken, dated, an artifact after only ten years of existence. “Jason Bourne” tries to slip him into the new world of action blockbusters; it is such a bad fit that it breaks the entire franchise.

A contributor wrote an amazing review for the Yap, so I just want to bring my focus back to the single idea that I left the theatre with: that this is a character who does not fit into our modern climate. The 2000's featured many prevalent themes in the action landscape. One was brutality, and the necessity of brutality, conveyed through the use of close-cut and chaotic action sequences. Another was (in a much more explicit sense) the use of corrupt government institutions / programs as agents of evil, which could be read in some ways as a response to Bush / Cheney. Less conspiratorial than the 90's, more overt. A third would be a more distinct cynicism, perhaps best rendered through the use of dystopia. We have clear enemies of peace that can be identified and taken out en-masse. A character like Jason Bourne fits into the first two, and I'd argue the third. Most importantly, he made them mainstream.

Where are we, almost through the 2010's? I think dystopia really has had its day, and it moving on its way out of the zeitgeist. Brutality continues to have its play but not in the same way. You can get Bourne-style action on television now; cinema is going larger, broader in its action sequences, by and large thanks to Superhero films and a resurgence of genre filmmaking. Villains are less directly related to “bad Government,” and once again more related to shadow conspiracies and shadow agents than dark regimes (not always). The morality of violence is less of a reason to naval-gaze, because as a country experiencing indirect warfare we rarely feel the need to grapple with it in our stories. Ultimately, and most importantly, I think our action movies are far less cynical, more fantastical, more inherently diverse and optimistic.

Perhaps the largest difference between the two decades in terms of storytelling is the importance of character. Bourne is not a character, so much as he is a tabula rasa for our anxiety and our need for action. Like Bond, or Bauer, or (), you can't really pick him out of a lineup based on what he cares about and what he needs beyond very basic emotions. This fit well in the 2000's; the 2010s, however, emphasize character over anything else. Characters sell.

How does “Jason Bourne” play into this temporal dichotomy? Well, the story feels much like a retread of the first three. Bourne is pulled out of hiding to confront his past and a shadowy Government threat, this time at the hands of the Director (Tommy Lee Jones) and Harper Lee (Alisha Vikander). Action ensues. Contemporary politics are confronted. But the problem with this is that he comes into this world as a man out of time. This is part of the text; unfortunately that doesn't make it work. The contemporary surveillance state is one of the issues of our time but it is not one that can be confronted indirectly at the hands of this kind of character. There's an extreme disconnect between the two. It doesn't play. Additionally, Bourne is provided with what amounts to a new backstory, in a way a 'superhero' origin story that removes the moral grey area from his past in an attempt at giving him a heroic future. But Jason Bourne is not a character. He isn't built for that. And nothing in “Jason Bourne” prepares him for it.

So not only is “Jason Bourne” not a good movie, it's an oddity, attempting to pull a character and an aesthetic out from a decade we've been trying to forget. At least it's easily forgettable.

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Jabber Out!