‘Jason Bourne’ reviews are in, and critics seem to like Damon more than the actual movie
'Time' wrote that Damon 'brings the personal touch,' while 'The Hollywood Reporter' said the film 'ends on a flat, unimpressive note.'
After nearly a decade spent on hiatus, the Jason Bourne series starring Matt Damon has finally returned to the silver screen. At the beginning of the fifth and new installment, Jason Bourne, the tough and self-tormented CIA assassin is still grappling with finding out about his past after having suffered from memory loss. (Notably, this new Bourne never calls back to the fourth Bourne movie, 2012’s The Bourne Legacy, which starred Jeremy Renner, not Damon, and which didn’t get nearly as good reviews as its three predecessors.) “It’s part of the first three [movies], it’s not a whole new chapter,” Damon told Entertainment Weekly of the fifth film back in February. “It feels like the conclusion of my identity journey.”Now that the movie is finally arriving in theaters this week, opening nationwide this Friday, critics who’ve seen it have published their first thoughts on Damon reviving the legendary action hero. Some are positive, but they’re not all completely flattering. The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy said Jason Bourne isn’t so bad until it “ends on a flat, unimpressive note”:
Unfortunately, then, the film ends on a flat, unimpressive note. … When in earlier series entries Bourne was emotionally bereft, obsessed about his father and determined to get to the bottom of things, there was always enough emotion to balance out the character’s machine-like efficiency and blank memory chips. Here, despite the welcome hints of vulnerability introduced by advancing age, Bourne seems rather more recessive and unavailable, an issue stemming from the script (which provides him with precious few lines) rather than from Damon, who is impressively opening up as an actor with the years.
Stephanie Zacharek for Time said Damon “brings the personal touch” Jason Bourne needs:
Yet Jason Bourne has one thing going for it. Watching Damon, in motion or in a rare moment of rest, is the movie’s purest pleasure. … Damon, his eternal boyishness finally settling into the inevitability of middle age, brings the personal touch this movie needs. Its action is generic, but he’s always special. When the camera comes in close, we see in his Jason Bourne a man of conscience and of great, bruised feelings. Damon’s Bourne is as good as dead if he fails to blend in. But he could never be just another bro in the crowd.
Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers praised the film’s “glorious stuntwork”:
For me, drowning in the pixelated muddle of most summer movies (Warcraft marking the lowest point), the realism [of Jason Bourne] is a distinct pleasure. Greengrass doesn’t stoop to hollow digital dazzle to jazz an audience. Long, fluid takes emphasize action that reveals character. Through it all, Damon keeps us glued to the war going on inside Bourne’s head. It’s a brilliantly implosive performance; he owns the role and the movie. It’s a tense, twisty mindbender anchored by something no computer can generate: soul.
The Daily Beast’s Jen Yamato noted the movie’s “visceral echoes of real life”:
But visceral echoes of real life accidentally make the over-the-top action feel more prescient than anyone could have intended. Greengrass’s last-act car chase showstopper is the most ambitiously destructive action sequence to happen to Sin City in the movies since Con Air. But just a few hours before I watched Damon wreak carnage upon countless cars on the crowded Strip, chasing Cassel at the wheel of an armored truck as he plowed his way through traffic, a terrorist attacker with a cargo truck had plowed his way through hundreds of unsuspecting victims in Nice, France, claiming 84 lives.
Scott Mendelson for Forbes was just, well, not satisfied in the slightest:
This is a franchise that peaked with The Bourne Supremacy (although I would argue Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity is about as good) and now keeps remaking that film in a way that removes more and more of the moral rot. Bourne’s reunion with Julia Stiles, a scene which contains some of the worst acting and stilted dialogue I’ve seen in a major motion picture in a very long time. Yes, there is indeed another super evil government assassination/spy program and “It’s worse than before.” You’ll roll your eyes as Bourne’s arbitrary quest to “learn the truth” merely put innocents lives (and not-so-culpable field agents) in mortal peril. You’ll sigh when the film comes to a natural climax only to have Bourne jump back into it because the movie needs a slam-bang finale.
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