Film Review: Matt Damon is Fighting Mad in Tense ‘Jason Bourne’

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CHICAGO – To come back to a character that everyone thought he had left behind, Matt Damon needed the right creative team. He got it again in co-writer (with Christopher Rouse) and director Paul Greengrass, and together they fashioned a paranoid spy tale in the rat-a-tat “Jason Bourne.”

Rating: 4.0/5.0

The strength of the story is in its modern context. The underground Bourne re-emerges in riot torn Greece (during its economic crisis), the CIA is in cahoots with a social media billionaire, plus the hackers and the rogue agents are more heroic than our institutions of “law and order.” The multi-layering of a desperate world blends with Matt Damon’s desperate character, a bitter killing machine trying to remember anything about a past that was taken away from him.

Ex-special agent Jason Bourne is in the “freezer,” as they say at the CIA, and he spends his days bare knuckle brawling on the Greek/Albanian border. Meanwhile, at Langley headquarters, the Director of Technology Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) detects a hacker (Julia Stiles) in Iceland, who has stolen crucial files having to do with the top secret programs that turned Bourne into an agency assassin.

The hacker needs to get the info to Bourne, and meets him in Athens, Greece, in the midst of a riot during the economic crisis. The CIA, embodied by director Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) has sent an “asset” (Vincent Cassel) to kill Bourne, and the pot is sweetened for the killer because Bourne once set him up for capture. When this spy comes in from the cold, the heat is on. 


Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “Jason Bourne”

Matt Damon is Targeted as the Title Character in ‘Jason Bourne’
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “Jason Bourne”