Bourne wants to get to the bottom of the secrets involving his dad, and for that he’ll need to confront Dewey. The sort of sociopath who never met anyone he didn’t finish by shooting directly in the forehead, Cassel’s character is just plain ruthless - and clearly a better match for Bourne’s skill set - which makes for violent efficiency as the two characters alternately stalk one another. He has dark pouches under his eyes and walks with a limp, and his good-ol’-boy drawl belies the fact that the man at the helm during an age of cyber-warfare most likely still has an AOL account.Īnd so Dewey delegates the high-tech duties to Lee, while depending on a contract killer known as “the Asset” (Vincent Cassel) to deal with the real problem: silencing Bourne. If the expressionless Vikander is meant to represent a newer, smarter CIA, then new addition Tommy Lee Jones, who plays agency director Robert Dewey, suggests the battle-worn and borderline-haggard version of his former Man in Black. Sneaking past the agency’s firewall from a warehouse in Reykjavik, Parsons manages to steal classified files with fresh information on Treadstone, the black-ops program for which Bourne was recruited, and its successor, code-named Iron Hand - information that appears to implicate Bourne’s own father (Gregg Henry) in some capacity.īut Parsons’ hack doesn’t go undetected, catching the attention of Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who stands in the middle of what looks like Mission Control for one of the Apollo landings - an elaborate CIA data-crunching center, where techies sit at computer consoles, presumably aggregating private information on American citizens. Parsons has fallen in with a WikiLeaks-like crusader named Christian Dassault (Vinzenz Kiefer), determined to reveal the CIA’s shady dealings, which point to a plan to force its way into a Facebook-like social network called Deep Dream. In this new arena, the most dangerous players aren’t foreign powers, or even terrorists, but hackers and information jockeys, à la Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
The game has changed in the decade-plus since Bourne went off the grid: Technology trumps things that go boom, and shadow operatives kill with keystrokes rather than old-school tactical strikes. So, what has Bourne been doing all this time? Turns out he’s been squandering his super-soldier training on grungy underground prizefights when Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) shows up with a fresh reason for him to reengage with his past. Now, the real Bourne has resurfaced, and both director and star are committed to making the most of it, holding us in their thrall until the Las Vegas-set finale, when this hyper-paranoid conspiracy thriller tilts into something bordering on silliness. Mostly, the project marks a return to what worked about the franchise - namely, Damon - suggesting the relief of watching Sean Connery step back into Bond’s shoes after producers tried to replace him with a suave male model in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Meanwhile, audiences are expected to forget both “The Bourne Legacy,” 2012’s disappointing attempt to carry on the name by casting Jeremy Renner in a superficially similar capacity, and “Green Zone,” the gritty (and virtually unseen) Iraq War thriller in which Damon and Greengrass tried to get serious.
Call it a rebirth: Matt Damon is back as Jason Bourne in the franchise’s tough, “this time it’s personal” fifth installment, titled, simply enough, “Jason Bourne.” To the extent that the entire Bourne series hinges on the notion of an amnesiac action hero - one who remembers how to kill with his bare hands but draws blanks on key details about his past - this explosive reunion between Damon and director Paul Greengrass further reveals key secrets about Bourne’s origins, bringing its lethal protagonist as close as he’s ever likely to get to total recall.