Bourne, Baby, Bourne

The newest in the Bourne series of films was released recently, so my movie buddy and I inked in a day/time that worked for both of us, bought the senior snack pack at the concession stand, and settled in for what we hoped would be high action and interesting adventure. Matt Damon is Jason Bourne, so it is good that the writers/producers did not try to re-create that character with another actor’s face, and Jeremy Renner physically fit the role of an engineered government assassin. Rachel Weisz as a Bourne sidekick? Nah, not so much.

What’s puzzling is the lack of a cohesive story, with the film beginning in Alaska, a strong premise for the storyline, then becoming a tedious, overly-long chase, capped off with an unbelievable 20-minute motorcycle chase, and ending on a boat somewhere in the middle of the ocean. What ties these vignettes together is a very thin thread and almost no story continuity. I waited for the Alaska exposition to become the film, but the focus turned to the quest for the green and blue pills, not an interesting storyline at all. The bad guys were typical government bad guys (Edward Norton, Stacy Keach) covering their asses when covert operations go awry, but Renner’s character, Aaron Cross, identified them, showed up at exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and dispatched them almost too easily and quickly. Weitz’s character, a PhD scientist, was unsure, scared, and whiny, so it was confusing that Renner’s character would waste his time and energy on using her to get to the green and blue pills: he was stronger without her than he was with her, which is not “typical” for Damon’s Bourne strategy.

The ending? So what? Who cares? There is no significance as the “adrift in the great oceans of the world” tack-on seems specifically aimed at a sequel, a sequel I doubt I’ll either anticipate or attend.

There is a reason that successful books make successful movies, and also a reason that screenwriters often don’t have the writing chops to create their own original concepts with the same depth and scope of a writer’s creation. Base the movies on Ludlum’s concepts and they turn out a whole lot better than creating a faux Bourne story just to keep the franchise alive in the box office.

I give this Bourne offering a C, with nothing that makes it either stand out or stand alone in the line of Bourne offerings. I'd rather watch a rerun of any of Damon's films than see this one again!