Jason Bourne

Another movie that I missed while in Australia and New Zealand is Jason Bourne which, by the way, I have been anticipating since I saw the first preview during the Super Bowl!  I finally had the chance to see it last night with my Dad and I liked it but it is definitely the weakest offering in the franchise!  It has been ten years since Bourne (Matt Damon) exposed Blackbriar and he is still on the run and clearly tormented.  Former CIA agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacks into the CIA mainframe and, while looking for evidence of another black op called Iron Hand, she discovers information about Bourne's recruitment and decides to track him down in Greece.  However, unknowingly, Parsons has attracted the attention of Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), head of the CIA's cyber ops division, and CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) who suspect, correctly, that she will lead them to Bourne.  As Bourne searches for more evidence about his recruitment, Lee and Dewey send an asset (Vincent Cassel), a CIA agent with a personal grudge against Bourne, to assassinate him leading to an ultimate showdown in Las Vegas.  As with the previous installments, this movie does have some great action sequences.  Paul Greengrass, who directed The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, with his signature use of hand-held cameras, puts us right in the middle of the action from Reykjavik, to Athens, to Berlin, to London, and, finally, to one of the best car chases I've ever seen on the Strip in Las Vegas (I also love the car chase on the streets of Moscow in The Bourne Supremacy).  Besides the great action sequences, the subject of this movie is quite timely and thought-provoking.  Iron Hand, the black op involving the use of a social media platform to spy on citizens in real-time, is pretty disturbing.  Are we willing to give up our privacy in the name of safety?  Damon is as inscrutable as ever as Bourne but I think that Vikander is completely wasted in this role because all she seems to do is say, "Copy that."  I will admit that I was a little bit disappointed in this movie because I have been anticipating it for so long but I didn't hate it.