Jason Bourne (2016)

The newness of his persona heightened the baptismal dimension of the immersion imagery that ran through the films. I don’t know which Christian writer was the first to use the phrase “Bourne again,” but I bet it was early on.

Jettisoning Robert Ludlum–style titles, the fifth film is called simply Jason Bourne, as if to reassure us that, unlike the last installment — The Bourne Legacy, starring Jeremy Renner — Matt Damon is definitely in this film. When we catch up with Webb, we find him well off the grid, earning a living via brutal street fighting. Is this what trying to do the right thing has come to?

There would seem to be no motivation for Webb to come back into the open. Even the entirely expected news that the black-ops work of Treadstone and Blackbriar continues under a new name, Ironhand, is hardly enough. But Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), Webb’s former Treadstone contact turned ally against the system, shows up with new information about his past — information with potentially redemptive meaning regarding Webb’s past life.

This is not a bad idea. It’s just two films too late. The thing is, however it happened, Webb became a man — as an early flashback reminds us — who could point a gun at the head of a hooded, bound prisoner about whom he knew essentially nothing and pull the trigger. I’m glad he wants to follow a different path now, but the issues of the character we meet here are no longer inherently involving to me.

It isn’t just the passage of time. The world has changed since 2007, and not only in the ways the filmmakers are self-consciously trying to engage: concerns about cyber-security, online privacy, government spying and the pressure on tech companies to give the government whatever information or access it wants.

These are valid concerns and could make for a compelling thriller, but they’re not a good match for the Bourne aesthetic, at least as it hashes out here. (After typing the Ludlumesque phrase “the Bourne aesthetic,” I just had to Google it; unsurprisingly there are hundreds of matches.)

Jason Bourne pits Tommy Lee Jones as an ossified new CIA director and Alicia Vikander as a coolly ambitious young agent against Bourne in a plot that combines lots of chasing and people getting shot — often in returning director Paul Greengrass’s trademark shaky-cam style — with lots of intent gazing at computer screens. This is not the most felicitous pairing in the world.

It doesn’t help that neither the dialogue nor the tech feel like the filmmakers have a real understanding of their material, always until now a series strength. Does anyone really think that if an agent were modifying computer files in the process of being stolen by hackers, deliberately infecting them with malware designed to signal the agent when the stolen files were opened, a confirmation alert would pop up on the agent’s screen with a message like “Malware attached”?

Jones brings absolutely nothing new as this installment’s Chris Cooper/Brian Cox evil white guy figure. Vikander is far more robotic than as an actual robot in her terrific Ex Machina performance. I understand the issues of the world she’s negotiating, but right up to the end she’s such an enigma that I’m still not sure how to take a crucial line of dialogue on which her final exchange with Webb turns.

There’s a bigger problem. The world has gotten more violent in the last decade, and brutal images of execution killings and large-scale violence in crowded public settings have become numbingly familiar, even commonplace.

Part of me shut down to the film with that first flashback of the execution of the hooded prisoner; subsequent casual kill shots by a character known only as “the asset” (Vincent Cassel) pushed me further away, even though he is one of the “bad guys” (to whatever extent that that term means anything in Bourne’s cynical world).

A climactic chase scene involves a bad guy roaring down the Las Vegas Strip in a five-ton armored SWAT van, plowing with abandon through whatever is in his way and leaving a wake of destruction.

Coincidentally, two weeks before the sequence was scheduled to be shot, a woman in Las Vegas went on a vehicular rampage along the same stretch of road, striking dozens of people and killing at least one. The convergence rattled the filmmakers; there was talk of scrapping the sequence, but ultimately they went ahead with it.

Eerily, Jason Bourne arrives two weeks after the horrific Bastille Day attack in Nice, France, in which the attacker drove a heavy cargo truck into a large crowd of revelers, killing 84 and injuring hundreds. I know the second coincidence isn’t the filmmakers’ fault, but it doesn’t make the set piece any more thrilling to me.

What definitely is the filmmakers fault is the convergence with my least favorite moment from an earlier Bourne film, a ruthless first-act turning point shamelessly recycled here. The first time around it was a cruel but justifiable move; now it’s become a trope, which makes me downright angry. If the filmmakers could do no better by these characters than this, they shouldn’t have brought them back.