Film Review - Jason Bourne (2016)

Jason Bourne sees the return of Matt Damon as Jason Bourne and Paul Greengrass in the director's chair and Bourne is now tracking down the mystery regarding his father that could well tie into his mysterious past.

I was very much looking forward to this film as it looked like a proper action film and it has been a fair while since we have had one of those (The Nice Guys was probably the last one we got and that was back in May) but could Damon and Greengrass's return to the series put things back on track or were they right to leave things after the 2002-2007 trilogy of films.

Well I have to say that I did enjoy this film but the more that I began to think about it the more it kinda shrank in my mind now that does not in any way make this a bad film as its very far from one but it also kinda became one that fell into the grey area a little bit.

The good however is very good Greengrass makes the film clip along at a really nice pace, there are some very exciting action sequences (ones set in Vegas and Greece were real highlights) and Vincent Cassel and Tommy Lee Jones are terrific in the film.

The bad however is pretty bad and there are three key components to this:

- The first is the films story, all throughout the film I kept thinking to myself "This is the Weapon X Program from X-Men" and that program was where Wolverine got his Metal Claws and had his memory wiped ("He will have no memory" says a voice from the past in X-Men 2) and that comparison became harder and harder to shake for me.

One positive side of that is that Tommy Lee Jones would've been a fantastic William Stryker although Brian Cox was simply brilliant in that role.

- Secondly Damon just didn't cut through for me this time around, he stood around a lot, walked really fast and scowled a lot and after a while I got a bit bored with it and his performance overall.

- And lastly Alicia Vikander who is a wonderful young actress is pretty much wasted in this film, she was so good in Ex Machina and the Man from UNCLE last year and she won an Academy Award but here she just plays the generic CIA officer that frankly any actress could've played, hopefully the Light Between Oceans and Tomb Raider will remind us all of how good she can be.

And so that was Jason Bourne, not a bad film at all but just not a great one either I suspect that I might have enjoyed this a lot more if I had seen the earlier films, 2 and a half out of 5.