The best part about this sequel is that it starts symbolically where the last one left off: protagonist deep under the blue waters, swimming, escaping, and surviving.
Then a visually spectacular intro of the snowy Alaskan mountains, hungry wolves, and no signs of civilization. It seems our hero is on a new challenging mission.
The next 15 minutes are breathtaking and novel: he survives his task, and also manages to cheat death and the people trying to kill him.
So far so good. And then, unfortunately, there is nothing new.
It is the same old story served up again, with a different face – and frankly Matt Damon as Jason Bourne was far more appealing and convincing.
It is not Jeremy Renner’s fault though; he has tried, and in most instances almost succeeded in filling Damon’s exceptionally large shoes. He runs, grunts, kicks ass, and successfully fights his nemesis, the parent ‘rogue’ company that made him who he is.
Sounds familiar? Well, it is.
If this was made a decade ago, or was the first of the series to be released, it might have worked. Pitching it as a sequel fails; if they had brought it out as a prequel, with more depth and twists in the story, it would have been fantastic.
Kudos to Tony Gilroy’s ‘slow’ Legacy? No.
The fact is it doesn’t charter any new territory. The whole point of a new movie should have been to provide audiences with a fresh perspective on Jason Bourne, faster, meatier action, and twists in the tale. After all, we get our ‘truthful’, bookish politics and intelligence from the news channels.
Gilroy’s political spy thriller, with minor twists and turns, is essentially a duller version of what its predecessors delivered: Cross, as a trained assassin and part of the whole Treadstone and intelligence program experimentation hoopla, is battling Alaska as part of some exercise he is meant to be doing.
But his life is dependent on a set of “chems”, green and blue medicinal pills he has been programmed to take. As a consequence of the problems of the Treadstone program outlined in the last film, Cross’s program is called off by the Department.
Which means, Cross and others like him throughout the world have to be eliminated.
Being our hero, he obviously survives, wants revenge and to get his life back by forcing Dr Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz) to help him get over his “chems” by planting another virus in his body.
The pace of the film doesn’t do it justice. Too many long conversations and far too little action: a
remarkable attempt by Renner, though the script fails him.
The choice of location for the major part of the non-innovative action, the Philippines, is probably the only good choice. Having the same action on western turf would have been unbearably dull.
The only interesting part of the script is that the story runs parallel to The Bourne Ultimatum,
giving us hope that the next film might feature Matt Dillon, or maybe both characters.
Overall, Paul Greengrass’s direction, and the fast pace of the first three installments is missed. The movie also had Edward Norton; now why would Gilroy waste such a brilliant actor on a behind-the-desk-no-physical- action-guy, one wonders.
And above all, please bring back Matt Damon.
