Bourne Old

I liked the original Bourne trilogy, although I don't think I recognized how smart they were until they were over. Bourne is a superspy, and director Paul Greengrass has a way of letting you see what he sees, read a scene the way he is reading it. It adds intelligence to the action. So I was looking forward to  Jason Bourne (2016). I don't think I got what I was looking for.

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne now remembers everything, how he was trained as an assassin, and how he killed so many for his intelligence agency masters (like Tommy Lee Jones). They would like to keep this all buried, but Julia Stiles, playing hacker, downloads the complete files on all the black ops. Damon picks them up in the middle of a democracy demonstration in Athens, under cover of chaos. I'm not sure this is really good spycraft, and it doesn't actually work out so well.

So Bourne finds himself being hunted by Jones, CIA agent Alicia Vikander, and finally, deadly killer Vincent Cassell, as "the Asset". There's the usual action scenes, fights and car chases, with plenty of shaky camerawork - emphasis on "usual". There wasn't a lot that struck me as new or, you know, smart.

Not really bad, but not good enough for this franchise.