Christopher Rhoten
I really like Jason Bourne—the series, that is. As a white male American teenager growing up in the 2010s, stylish action-heavy spy thrillers mixed with my cinematic interests like peanut butter and jelly. I liked martial arts, I liked brooding, and I liked the feeling that I wasn’t just watching any action film. I was watching the serious and grown-up version that I had read vaguely had something to do with American imperialism.
What once seemed like the gold standard for espionage isn’t brought up quite as fondly these days. For starters, Paul Greengrass’s series finale, 2016’s Jason Bourne, has long been seen as both not very good and sort of unnecessary, since his own Ultimatum a decade earlier was, itself, a conclusion. Further still, “shaky cam” is no longer the preferred filter for capturing violence onscreen, if ever it was (go ahead, search up one of the fights on YouTube—the comments will be full of John Wick fans lamenting the fact that whoever shot these movies seemed to have been perpetually chased by an angry horde of bees). There’s also the fact that star Matt Damon, well, hasn’t shown the best judgment in years since.
With Damon topping the box office once again in The Odyssey, Jason Bourne now ten years old, and talk of another sequel still floating around, it’s as good a time as any to reassess this series. While I imagine plenty of what I liked as a kid or a teen wasn’t actually as popular as I remember it, I refused to accept that these movies weren’t the prestige summer action franchise I recalled. The Bourne Ultimatum grossed $444 million in 2007. Adjusted for inflation, that’s gotta be, like, massively higher today (Bourne, for all of his skills and competencies, was never an avatar for kids interested in math). Am I supposed to believe a single bad egg scrubbed David Webb from the history books?
As the title suggests, this is a Jason Bourne retrospective. It is specifically about the film that no one likes. But upon revisiting these stories, I’ve discovered that so much of what I want to say about this film is inseparable from what I want to say about the others. The sins of Jason Bourne are built into the franchise because Jason Bourne is about as Jason Bourne as it gets.
As you may or may not be aware, every installment in the Bourne series follows the same pattern: Jason Bourne, a former assassin, is hunted by the very government agency that created him, forcing him to evade capture while uncovering some sort of conspiracy tied to a secret CIA program. There are usually scores of interns typing on computers, aging A-list actors playing evil suits who sit and plan from afar, and the running gag of putting Bourne in places where he can see his enemies, but they can’t see him. It all blurs together after a while, and even Moby’s “Extreme Ways” doesn’t hit the same after you’ve broken everything new again, again. How many torturous memories can one man chase? Why doesn’t Bourne ever recall eating ice cream on a hot summer day?
Shotgunning the Bourne trilogy, let alone all five, reveals them to be highly formulaic overall. Yet, it also reveals another truth. Despite their flaws, they really hold up, and they mix things up to a degree. The Bourne Identity is a love story. The Bourne Supremacy is a revenge thriller. The Bourne Ultimatum is one big, long chase, perhaps the Mad Max: Fury Road of the 2000s, if you’ll humor a tired old Bourne fan.
These movies set the blueprint. What we now see as an excess of tropes was fresh back then. In the early 2000s, James Bond was driving an invisible car, and Ethan Hunt was backflipping off a motorcycle. The Bourne Identity, meanwhile, was about a regular guy, one played by a respected, skilled actor, someone with a relatable goal and a plausible if satisfyingly exaggerated skill set. The vaguely European feel of the first film and its memorable romance (shoutout, of course, to Run Lola Run’s Franka Potente) were just as refreshing as the fight scenes, which, while disorienting, are wonderfully choreographed and endlessly creative—watching Bourne weaponize a ballpoint Bic pen or a rolled-up magazine still highlights a sheer, terrifying physical competence missing in the over-the-top stunts and rubbery CGI of the era.
Furthermore, the Bourne trilogy is a good story. The chaotic, documentary-style cinematography grounded the spy genre in gritty, post-9/11 realism and, in turn, anchored this physical competence in a twisty tale about a man realizing he used to be just as callous as those chasing him. The bad guys in these films are almost exclusively government officials. Jason Bourne was a reminder that nobility was not corporate or bureaucratic, nor something that existed only in camp. Here it is in the real world, with real stakes and real people. Here it is, despite a life spent doing the opposite. We want to see Bourne kick butt and come out on top because he’s a well-written character in comparatively character-driven films, even if all the typing and enhancing and “I want Jason Bourne dead!” grow tiresome in large doses.
My favorite of the bunch has always been The Bourne Supremacy. I credit its ending for that. Bourne sits down with the daughter of the first couple he ever assassinated and spills his guts. He is speaking to the daughter, but he’s also speaking to Marie, his accomplice/lover, who was murdered as a result of their relationship. Crucially, he’s speaking as an allegory for America in the wake of, ahem, waking up to its injustices. Bourne has made some fatal mistakes. He’s sorry.
While I can’t say Supremacy (or the franchise as a whole) is radically subversive, ending a summer blockbuster not with a dramatic kill but with a quiet scene in which the protagonist admits he’s done some evil things is, even today, a bold move. Ending The Bourne Ultimatum with a capital E-ending was another win. The third film strains under the weight of trying to take the conspiracy deeper and find a new bad guy for Bourne to beat with a newspaper, but it does, and it also delivers the essential, final stop in the rabbit hole: that Jason Bourne chose to become a Treadstone agent. He wasn’t born a weapon, but he volunteered all the same. With the truth uncovered and Bourne disillusioned but free to look to the future instead of the past, our hero swims away, and Moby graces our ears once again, seemingly for the final time.
Which finally brings us to Jason Bourne.
After a brief detour with the spin-off The Bourne Legacy, a film so detached from the “rest” of the franchise that I have nothing to say about it, it was decided the series should continue, but that it couldn’t without the big dogs. So director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon would reunite for one more trip down tortured memory lane.
There are more secrets, more hidden truths, more things to remember for our favorite spy turned government nuisance. Not only does this film tell the same story for the fourth time, but it is also more shameless in its recycling of plot points than ever. Jason Bourne is on the run yet again despite having nothing to do with the central conflict. Julia Stiles’ Nicky Parsons is fridged halfway through to give the story momentum (a tired echo of Supremacy), and half the movie is two people in a dimly lit room conversing in hushed tone spy-speak. Did I mention Tommy Lee Jones is here, and in a suit no less?
Here’s the thing, though. By itself, Jason Bourne isn’t really all that worse than the previous films. The script is, frankly, serviceable. The idea of whether the truth is illuminating or destructive is a natural extension of The Bourne Ultimatum, and Vincent Cassel’s brutal Asset (who operates as an unthinking mirror to Damon’s defector) is a compelling physical threat. The film’s mass-surveillance metaphor (Facebook riff “Deep Dream”) is an already dated but not overly egregious attempt to make the story topical once again. The promise of an older, but not necessarily wiser, Bourne would capture any fan’s attention.
On paper, a lot of these decisions seem organic. If I were to write up an action thriller in a vacuum, I wouldn’t point to this film as an example of how not to do it. The fatal flaw? Ultimatum’s ending mirrors Identity’s for a reason. This story ended a decade ago, yet here is a sequel with the same style, structure, and subject matter. A sequel that’s incredibly predictable, rote, and routine as a result. It is the same formula again: a fourth helping of a three-star meal after the previous three have left you full.
For a film like Jason Bourne to justify itself, it needed to do something off the beaten path. It needed to break from the programming that previously made the franchise so efficient and, make no mistake about it, successful. What about a film that spends more time following Bourne as a lowly prizefighter? What about a film where Treadstone and Blackbriar remain distant memories? What about a film that doesn’t try to directly tie into the old films?
Those aren’t the natural ways to extend the franchise, but they would be interesting. They would tell a new story rather than a prolonged version of one that wrapped up and started shipping to stores in “The Complete Collection” box sets ten years ago. Even though it’s based on a book series, let’s not forget Doug Liman never planned these movies as a decades-spanning series. Jason Bourne’s journey could have ended after a single film. In some ways, even a trilogy was overachieving.
Instead, Jason Bourne has to “fit”. It has to say something new about the same themes. But with everything concluded and everything already said, the franchise simply reinterprets its own story because that’s the only approach left. By virtue of its redundancy, the film fundamentally breaks Bourne’s arc to create new stones to overturn.
Halfway through the movie, we learn through flashbacks that Bourne was manipulated into joining Treadstone after his father was murdered, a twist that implies he was actually never that bad a guy. Like The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which makes Peter the only person whose DNA could ever become Spider-Man, this robs the character of what makes him uniquely compelling. If Jason Bourne was tricked into the program, it renders his prior motivation more understandable. He becomes a victim of circumstance rather than a perpetrator seeking atonement. Bourne was at his strongest when the person in the rearview mirror was an unrecognizable monster compared to this newly empathetic man, and this revelation is borderline disastrous in the context of the series.
Even beyond this blunder, franchise staples like the shaky cam, the espionage, the disbelief that Jason Bourne is alive and still on the run—they just can’t hit the same. We’ve seen it all before, and better, and in the context of a story that hadn’t yet run its course. Instead of acknowledging its age and irrelevance, it’s a film that pretends it’s still 2004, still running on questions answered long ago, still relying on tropes that inspired a decade of action films, which in turn inspired another to do things differently in response. Instead of making a film about how Bourne was never the character we thought he was, why not allow him to grow? Why not allow the style and structure to evolve around him?
I have a theory of sorts: legacy sequels succeed by either offering genuine novelty or wearing the skin of novelty. For example, the recent Toy Story films work because they attempt to tell new stories despite using the same characters. Meanwhile, 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine—a film that gives Wolverine an arc he’s already gone through in four other movies—mostly escaped criticism for its self-plagiarism by dutifully checking off long-gestating fanboy expectations that felt superficially “new.”
Jason Bourne, however, was a traditional continuation that lacked the thematic territory to justify one. Much like its protagonist, its biggest issue is trying to abstain from executing its core programming. The shaky cam and audience fatigue weren’t, by themselves, what made the film unremarkable. It was the realization that these movies only have one story to tell and one way to tell it.
As mentioned, Matt Damon and company have been trying to get a new Bourne film off the ground with All Quiet on the Western Front’s Edward Berger for the last couple of years, so far unsuccessfully. The problem, naturally, is figuring out what it would even be about. For all its sins, Jason Bourne has a really, really good ending, one where Bourne reveals he’s yet again one step ahead of an agency that will never stop hunting him.
I see this hesitation and struggle as a good sign. There are any number of reasons to make a sequel, and oftentimes the worst ones come from perfectly reasonable, sensible, obvious ways to do another. If there is to be another Damon-starring Bourne one day, I would like to see the filmmakers working on this project take another note from its hero and attempt some improvisation.
The memories of the older films will always be there, their quality and influence waiting to be uncovered by new fans or recalled by people like me. What about a Jason Bourne that reinvents itself, much in the same way we’ve always cheered for this protagonist to? Is this a franchise capable of such a transformation without finding a new operative to follow? Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s the only burning question this series has yet to answer.
