By J.D. Lafrance
When The Bourne Identity (2002) debuted in theaters audiences were hungry for a new kind of spy film. The James Bond movies adhered to a tried-and-true formula and it had gotten old. For the most part, the adventures that Bond had in his movies never affected him personally (the notable exception being On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Licence to Kill). In America, Mission: Impossible II (2000) collapsed under John Woo’s stylistic excesses and a boring love story with no chemistry between Tom Cruise and his love interest played by Thandie Newton. The world had changed dramatically since the events of 9/11 and a new international espionage action thriller would have to acknowledge this new reality. Along came The Bourne Identity, a very loose adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s novel of the same name, that took the genre and personalized it, but without sacrificing all the things we’ve come to expect from a spy movie: exotic locales, exciting car chases, lethal bad guys, and intense fight scenes. What made the film such a breath of fresh air was how it tweaked these tried and true conventions.
A mysterious, unconscious body is found floating out at sea by a boatload of fishermen. Two bullets in his back and a device that stores a Swiss bank account are found embedded in his hip. He wakes up with amnesia and one of the men onboard fixes him up. It isn’t until almost five minutes in that the first bit of understandable dialogue is uttered. Up to that point director Doug Liman dropped us into this strange world without any set up so that we are disoriented, much like the film’s protagonist. Therefore, we identify and empathize with him almost instantly. These first few scenes establish the film’s style – constantly moving camerawork often with jarring, jerky movements that mimic our hero’s disorientation.
After two weeks at sea, he makes his way to land and begins a quest to uncover his identity. Over time, he discovers skills he didn’t know he had but that come out instinctively, like the ability to disable two armed police officers with his bare hands in Switzerland. He checks out his Swiss bank account and discovers that his name is Jason Bourne (Matt Damon). The safety deposit box contains money, passports for several different countries, and a gun. It becomes obvious that Bourne assembled this stash of supplies in case of a situation like the one he’s currently experiencing.
After a daring escape from the United States embassy, Bourne pays a young German woman named Marie (Franka Potente) to drive him to Paris where he apparently lives. It turns out that he’s a lethal, CIA-trained assassin who has something to do with a top-secret operation known as Treadstone and he should be dead. The United States government is trying to silence an exiled Nigerian dictator by the name of Nykwana Wombosi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Aghaje) now living in Paris. He wants the CIA to put him back in power in six months or he’ll blow the whistle on their attempt to assassinate him. The man in charge of Treadstone – Alexander Conklin (Chris Cooper) – wants to make sure Bourne is dead as he was supposed to kill Wombosi when something went wrong. He sends three other assassins after Bourne and Marie.
Bourne suffers from amnesia and is being hunted by a secret branch of the CIA and so we sympathize with his plight. It doesn’t hurt that he’s portrayed by Matt Damon who comes across as instantly likable and empathetic. Before The Bourne Identity, he was not regarded as an action star and so his capacity for sudden bursts of ruthlessly efficient violence and the ability to escape from several dangerous situations was a revelation. Damon pulls it off and more importantly is convincing as a deadly assassin with no memory. The actor does an excellent job of not only gaining our sympathy early on, but also maintaining it throughout as we root for Bourne to figure out his identity.
When Bourne breaks out his martial arts for the first time in the film we are as surprised as he is and not just because it’s the first time we’ve seen him do so, but at the time Damon had never done a film like this before and it was his debut as a man of action. To his credit, he looks very adept and comfortable in the fight scenes and doing the stunts. The first substantial fight sequence, where Bourne is attacked by a fellow Treadstone assassin, is a visceral set piece as he uses every day objects like a pen to defend himself. This is not the clean, polished style of Bond movies, but down and dirty fighting that looks bloody and painful. It has a personal vibe to it as the fight takes place up close and personal in an apartment. I like that the film shows Marie’s reaction to what has just happened. She is genuinely shocked and upset at the sudden outburst of violence she witnessed. As she and Bourne flee the scene she even throws up as a reaction to being in real danger.
The casting of Franka Potente as Bourne’s love interest is an intriguing choice. She doesn’t have the supermodel looks associated with the Bond girls. She’s beautiful with a nice smile and an easy-going charm. She’s relatable and grounded – part of the film’s realistic aesthetic. Marie is an every day person thrust into extraordinary circumstances once she encounters Bourne. Potente also brings a certain amount of international cinema cache thanks to her breakout performance in Run Lola Run (1998). As a result, she doesn’t come across as some damsel in distress, but a proactive foil for Bourne. They quickly develop an easy rapport as he finds her constant, nervous talking comforting. Damon and Potente play well off each other in these early scenes as her character humanizes Bourne so that he’s not just some inhuman killing machine.
Chris Cooper is ideally cast as the no-nonsense bureaucrat Conklin who knows more than Bourne and yet is always one step behind in finding and catching the elusive assassin. He isn’t given much to do, but makes the most of his limited screen-time as he orchestrates the search for Bourne with considerable technological resources at his disposal. Cooper exudes just the right amount of uptight malevolence that we’ve come to expect from a Republican-controlled government. A young Clive Owen shows up as a Treadstone assassin who methodically tracks and then kills his targets. His showdown with Bourne in a field of tall grass is a tension-filled sequence as our hero uses misdirection to get the drop on the assassin, neutralizing him, but not before he imparts crucial information about Bourne’s past.
One of the reasons that The Bourne Identity was such a game changer for the spy movie genre came as a result of taking the hi-tech surveillance used in movies like Enemy of the State (1998) and updated it on a global scale as Conklin and his room full of I.T. specialists (including character actor extraordinaire Walton Goggins in a small role) track Bourne’s movements in Europe. Everyone leaves electronic footprints be it through credit card use or being picked up on security cameras and this was even more prevalent after 9/11. This heightened sense of surveillance has become a part of our daily lives. There is a certain delicious irony at work as Liman crosscuts between Conklin and his staff using sophisticated technology to find two people doing their best to stay off the grid, which results in them taking refuge in a house in the French countryside.
I like that Liman shows Bourne and Marie actually trying figure out his identity by doing the legwork involved as they call potential leads on the phone, visit key locations and talk to people as they try to put together the jigsaw puzzle that is his past. There’s an excellent sequence where Bourne walks Marie through a task that he needs her to do. As she makes her way through a hotel lobby his words play through her head and we hear them over the soundtrack in voiceover narration.
At its heart, The Bourne Identity is a mystery as Bourne tries to figure out who he is and why there are people trying to kill him. This gives Liman the opportunity to ratchet up the tension as Bourne is constantly looking over his shoulder, never able to rest for too long and unable to trust anyone except for Marie. Known previously for character-driven independent films Swingers (1996) and Go (1999), Liman showed his adeptness at working in multiple genres by bringing his trademark loose, almost improvisational approach that breathed new life into the spy genre. It had become safe and predictable and it took an outsider like Liman and casting against type with Damon to shake things up. Without The Bourne Identity, Casino Royale (2006) would have been a very different film and the subsequent Daniel Craig Bond films wouldn’t be as gritty and substantial as they are.
After the grueling experience that was making the film, Damon was understandably wary about reprising the role of Bourne. However, the film’s substantial box office success meant that the studio was eager to crank out a sequel and brought their leading man back into the fold with the promise of a new director after Doug Liman managed to alienate almost everyone on the first film. Paul Greengrass, director of the critically-acclaimed Bloody Sunday (2002) came on board taking up where Liman left off by adopting the same loose, hand-held camerawork and cranking up the intensity, especially with the action sequences, to the detriment of some that felt the herky-jerky movements resulted in motion sickness. Regardless, The Bourne Supremacy (2004) was a hit both critically and commercially, outperforming Identity.
Bourne and Marie are off the grid, taking refuge in India and this gives him time to sort through his fragmented memories and feverish nightmares. But, as is always the case with these kinds of films, our hero can’t stay hidden for long and trouble finds him. Meanwhile, a top-secret government deal in Berlin goes bad. Two agents are assassinated by Russian bad guys who steal $3 million and files that pertain to the whereabouts of Bourne. Greengrass ups the stakes right from the get-go as he has Bourne framed for the agents’ deaths and the stolen money with an assassin (Karl Urban) tracking him and Marie down. An exciting car chase ensues that leaves Bourne alone and putting on him on the run again. This makes him dangerous as he has nothing holding him back so he can focus entirely on finding out who wants him dead and sift through the remnants of Operation Treadstone from the first film.
One of the first things that becomes obvious while watching this film is how its look harkens back to 1970s American cinema. Greengrass utilizes the gritty, realistic look of his previous film, the powerful Bloody Sunday, with a lot of hand-held camerawork and snap zooms to give a you-are-there rush of adrenaline and urgency to the action sequences. In the car chases, Greengrass often places the camera right in the vehicle so that it is almost like we are riding along with Bourne, trying to piece together his fragmented past. In particular, the first chase in India is like The French Connection (1971) by way of Calcutta. Tony Gilroy’s screenplay wastes no time getting into it. We’re not 15 minutes into the film and Bourne is being chased by a mysterious and ruthless Russian assassin. It is this intense, no-nonsense pacing that propels this film so that one barely notices the two-hour running time.
Damon plays Bourne with a quiet determination and intensity. It’s a surprisingly minimalist performance devoid of self-conscious tics and proves that his performance in the first Bourne film was no fluke. Bourne is not some invincible, super-soldier, but a tortured man trying to rebuild his past and his identity. He doesn’t kill unless absolutely forced to. He is certainly a man of action, capable of going from an inert, passive figure to one full of explosive action in a heartbeat. Supremacy sheds more light on his past as he’s haunted by a job where he killed a Russian politician and his wife. Damon does a superb job of portraying a man coming to terms with the fact that he is a killer. Bourne also comes to terms with the notion that what was just another mission for him forever changed the life of a young woman who was made an orphan as he killed her parents. It is an important part of the humanizing of Bourne as he sheds his past of being a detached assassin to someone trying to redeem himself. He tracks down people like Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), introduced in Identity as a handler to the Treadstone assassins, that can provide him with pieces of his past so that he confronts it and understands what he was in order to change who he is in the present.
The primary bone of contention that critics had with The Bourne Supremacy was how Greengrass films the action sequences. There is an impressively staged fight scene between Bourne and another Operation Treadstone survivor in Munich that is dizzyingly claustrophobic thanks to extensive hand-held camerawork that dives right into the chaos. It is memorable not only for its jarring brutality but also for Bourne’s skill with a rolled-up magazine that he uses to defend himself against a rather large knife. Greengrass’ camera flies around the tight confines of this room, dragging us along for this visceral, almost primal sequence. He treads a fine line between being edgy and incoherent, but knows just how far to push it – something that the countless imitators didn’t always achieve. This approach drew criticism for being too fragmented and disorienting, making it difficult to see what was happening but I think it was Greengrass’ attempt to put the audience right in the middle of the action and to experience the sudden and brutal nature of how quickly these guys fight.
Joan Allen’s Pamela Landy is an interesting character in that initially it appears as if she will be an antagonist like Conklin in The Bourne Identity, but when she’s assigned to investigate the Berlin job she uncovers the existence of Treadstone and this brings her up against Ward Abbott (Brian Cox), the operation’s caretaker and the man who also mothballed it. She’s no dummy and quickly figures out its nature, what Conklin was up to and Bourne’s role, which, in a nicely executed scene, quickly recaps the events of Identity for those who haven’t seen it. Over the course of Supremacy, she shows indications of sympathy towards Bourne’s plight that are developed further in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Allen’s scenes with Cox are interesting as they are often fused with tension as Landy uncovers the secrets of Treadstone while Abbott, clearly uncomfortable with his dirty laundry being aired, tries to cover his ass, which makes for some heated exchanges between the two as they butt heads.
The Bourne Supremacy gives more screen-time to the character of Nicky Parsons. Landy brings her along because of what she knows, but Nicky ends up playing a crucial role when Bourne confronts her, asking questions about the operation. Stiles was an up and coming movie star in the late 1990s with films like 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), but had dropped off the mainstream radar by the mid-2000s. I enjoy seeing her pop up in the Bourne films even if she isn’t give much to do initially.
Ultimately, The Bourne Supremacy is all about the title character making amends for his past. There is a scene where he confronts the woman, whose parents he killed, that is rich in understated emotion as Bourne takes responsibility for his actions and tells her what really happened. It’s a great way to end the film as Greengrass eschews the cliché of a climactic action sequence (which happens before this scene) in favor of a more poignant one as Bourne atones for one of his many sins while also setting things up for the next installment.
After two films with Bourne on the defensive and on the run, The Bourne Ultimatum sees our hero going on the offensive and taking the fight to his handlers. Coming full circle not only thematically, but also on a production level – the film was born out of chaos as principal photography began without a completed screenplay – it managed to come out the other side with a coherent final product that endeared itself to both audiences and critics. Ultimatum not only avoids the dreaded third installment of a trilogy jinx (they are notoriously the weakest), but ends up being the strongest one of the series as Bourne gets some definitive answers to who he is and his past.
Ultimatum picks up right where The Bourne Supremacy left off with Bourne on the run in Moscow after being seriously injured in an exciting car chase with a fellow Treadstone assassin. Meanwhile, Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), an investigative reporter with The Guardian, a British newspaper, is working on a story about Bourne and a top-secret CIA operation known as Blackbriar. Naturally, the agency finds out and puts Ross under surveillance in the hopes that Bourne will contact him, which he does, at a busy London train station.
Bourne’s rendezvous with Ross amidst the hustle and bustle of the train station is an understated homage to the opening of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) as the two men are heavily scrutinized by all kinds of CIA surveillance. There is a lot of fun to be had watching Bourne masterfully evade all their manpower and hi-tech equipment in a wonderfully intense and insanely choreographed sequence that successfully ratchets up the tension as the CIA closes in. However, before Bourne can get Ross to reveal his source, an extremely efficient Blackbriar assassin (Edgar Ramirez) kills the journalist and disappears like a ghost.
Fortunately, Bourne takes Ross’ notes and figures out that the source is located in Madrid. During the course of his investigation, Bourne is reunited with Nicky Parsons, a CIA operative sympathetic to his plight. Within the agency, the man in charge of Blackbriar, CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), wants Bourne dead as he sees him as a dangerous liability while returning agent Pamela Landy wants to take him alive because she doesn’t agree with Vosen’s methods. This results in some wonderfully testy bickering between the two actors as they argue over what to do about Bourne. The rest of Ultimatum plays out as a brilliantly staged cat and mouse game with Bourne turning the tables on his handlers.
This time around, David Strathairn is the veteran character actor enlisted to play the CIA honcho tasked to find and eliminate Bourne. Like Chris Cooper in The Bourne Identity and Brian Cox in The Bourne Supremacy before him, he has the gravitas to play a take-charge authority figure and part of the enjoyment of this film is watching Bourne constantly thwart Vosen’s plans. In Ultimatum, Landy is a more sympathetic figure as she wants to capture Bourne alive (unlike Vosen). As the film progresses and she learns more about what the U.S. government did to Bourne and others in Treadstone, she realizes that she can no longer be complicit in the CIA’s illegal activities. Nicky Parsons also undergoes significant development as she ends up helping Bourne and turns out to be a key figure in his past.
Greengrass returned behind the camera bringing his trademark, no-nonsense pacing and visceral, hand-held camerawork to Ultimatum. The film’s action sequences are the epitome of edgy intensity as the fight scenes are quick and as brutal as a PG-13 rating will allow. They are realistically depicted – after all, guys as well trained as Bourne don’t waste any time and know exactly how to bring someone down as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
Like with the other Bourne films, Ultimatum also has exciting chases, including the police pursuing Bourne over rooftops in Tangiers while he’s chasing an assassin going after Nicky, and a crazy car chase through the busy streets of New York City. Greengrass and his stunt people upped the ante on the chases, most notably the sequence in Tangiers, which starts off with scooters in the busy streets and then after a car bomb goes off, along rooftops on foot. Greengrass’ kinetic camerawork is taken to the next level as we literally follow Bourne leaping through the air from one building to another.
The lo-tech versus hi-tech dichotomy is beautifully realized in all three Bourne films as symbolized in the way he kills the highly trained assassins sent to kill him. In Identity it’s with a pen, in Supremacy it’s with a rolled up magazine and in Ultimatum it’s with a book. The films never make a big deal about it and even show how well Bourne can manipulate technology, but his best chance at survival is to MacGyver it and stay off the grid.
If Identity was about our hero escaping from his CIA handlers and Supremacy was about him figuring out why they are still after him, then Ultimatum is all about getting revenge on those responsible for messing up his life in the first place and figuring out, once and for all, his identity. What elevates Ultimatum (and the rest of the series) above, say, the Mission: Impossible movies, is that it is more than just an exciting thriller (although, it does work on that level). It is also has a sharp, political component in the form of a scathing critique of the CIA’s dirty little secrets. The series ultimately asks, what happens when a highly-trained and conditioned government operative questions what he does and why? How does he undo the programming that made him what he is and come to grips with what he’s done? This film answers these questions to a satisfying degree while also being very entertaining conclusion to the series.
After the critical and commercial success of Ultimatum, Damon and Greengrass, declined to make a follow-up, feeling that they had taken the character of a psychogenic amnesiac CIA assassin as far as he could go. To be fair, the film felt like a fitting conclusion but Hollywood studios are not known to stop cranking out installments for lucrative franchises and Universal Pictures gave the series’ screenwriter Tony Gilroy a shot at writing and directing his own entry in the series. The Bourne Legacy (2012) saw Jeremy Renner take over the lead as another CIA operative on the run from the United States government when his black ops program is shutdown. The film performed well enough but the general feeling was that most people wanted to see Damon reprise his role as Bourne.
Enough time had finally passed for Damon and Greengrass and they came up with a new Bourne story, inspired partly by the effects of Edward Snowden’s leaking of classified information from the National Security Agency on espionage and surveillance all over the world. How would it affect the Bourne world and bring him out of self-imposed exile? Not surprisingly, the unimaginatively titled Jason Bourne (2016) was a financial success as audiences were more than happy to see the actor reprise one of his most beloved characters while leaving many critics underwhelmed.
Still haunted by all the people he killed for the CIA, Bourne is living off the grid in Greece as a bare-knuckle brawler. Meanwhile, ex-CIA operative Nicky Parsons is in Iceland hacking classified agency databases for more information on Bourne before he had his brains scrambled by Operation Treadstone. This gets the attention of CIA Cyber Ops chief Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) and knowledge of the breach is quickly reported to the current director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones).
The rather ambitious Lee pushes to be put in charge of the operation to find and bring in Nicky and, if possible, Bourne while Dewey hedges his bets and brings in the Asset (Vincent Cassel), an Operation Blackbriar assassin, to take out Bourne. The rest of the film plays out in typical Bourne fashion with him on the run from the CIA, which takes him to various places all over the world, trying to piece together more of his past until the inevitable confrontation with a rival assassin.
Bourne and Nicky’s initial meet and greet is amidst turbulent demonstrations and civil unrest on the streets of Athens. Greengrass does an excellent job orchestrating and immersing us in this chaos as we see Bourne use it to his advantage. The director ratchets up the tension as CIA operatives close in on Bourne and Nicky, demonstrating why he’s still one of the best action directors around.
The Bourne films have always had memorable fight scenes and this one is no different as Bourne and the Asset have a bloody, knock down, drag-out fight that is a more stripped down encounter then in previous films. Jason Bourne also has a memorable chase sequence as Bourne pursues the Asset, driving an armored SWAT truck, through the streets of Las Vegas in an exciting, intense sequence.
For most of the film, Damon plays the Bourne we are familiar with from the previous installments but this is bookended by the introductory scene, which gives us a self-destructive man with no direction, and a climactic scene towards the end where he confronts Dewey and you can see Bourne trying to figure out who he is and what he wants to do next. The most frustrating aspect of Jason Bourne is that Damon and Greengrass don’t delve into Bourne’s questioning side enough as they fall back on the requisite action set pieces of mayhem that is the staple of the franchise.
Tommy Lee Jones brings his trademark, no-nonsense gruffness as he plays yet another government bureaucrat frustrated by Bourne’s actions. Alicia Vikander plays a thankless role that requires very little emotion on her part, as her icy operative remains enigmatic and morally elusive. The always-reliable Vincent Cassel plays the first of Bourne’s rival assassins to have significant screen-time and something of a backstory that gives the character a personal stake in his mission to stop Bourne.
The tricky thing about sequels is that if you deviate too far from what made the previous film(s) successful you risk alienating fans who want more of what they loved. If you stick too close to the formula you’re criticized for playing it safe. Either way, filmmakers are screwed but the best sequels build on what came before in a meaningful and satisfying way. Jason Bourne is only somewhat successful in doing so.
What separates it from the other films in the series and makes it relevant for what is happening in the world today? For starters, cyber warfare features prominently with Heather Lee representing a new kind of foot soldier – the hacker that knows how to manipulate data in new ways that makes it tougher for people like Bourne to evade detection and achieve his goals. Social media is featured prominently as Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), the CEO and founder of Deep Dream, a Google+-type website, is in bed with the CIA, which raises all sorts of questions about privacy on the Internet. If electronic data exists online it is accessible to anyone with the skills to retrieve it.
Watching Jason Bourne makes The Bourne Legacy that much more of an unnecessary installment within the franchise both tonally and visually. Despite being written by Gilroy it never felt like it existed in the Bourne world despite the connective narrative tissue. It didn’t feel like a Bourne film but rather a simulacrum of one. Jason Bourne takes us back to this world in a way that is entertaining and was relevant to what was happening in the world in 2016.
The Bourne franchise is a smart one, willing to take chances. The filmmakers cast an atypical action hero with Matt Damon, surrounded him with eclectic actors that mixed Hollywood and internationally known stars with the likes of Franka Potente, Julia Stiles, Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, and Karl Urban and hired independent filmmakers like Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass against type to direct, letting them put their own unique stamp on their respective films.
I enjoy the rhythms of the Bourne films – the rapid-fire editing, the kinetic, hand-held camerawork, and the intriguing critique of CIA surveillance techniques masquerading as an action thriller. It is this finger on the pulse of contemporary geopolitics and how it intersects with cutting edge technology that has made them distinctive from the James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises. I also like the personal nature of the Bourne films. He isn’t interested in saving the world from some power-hungry villain. He just wants to find out more about who he is and why he became a CIA operative, and if he puts a spanner in the works of a few of their programs then so be it.