Movie Review - Jason Bourne

***Movie #5 of BOURNE Week***

Jason Bourne (2016)

Starring Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Riz Ahmed, and Julia Stiles

Directed by Paul Greengrass

Director Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon make their return to the action series that really made both of them famous with Jason Bourne which tosses Bourne Legacy star Jeremy Renner to the curb as we delve back into the story of the title character.  Unfortunately, in the first film in the series not to be co-written by Tony Gilroy, the flick flounders a bit, feeling more like a rehash rather than something original.

By now, we all get that the CIA is trying to shut down many of their special ops units -- they've been doing so for the past four movies -- so when former agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) finds and downloads a ton of info on the specialized programs, she quickly becomes a target of the CIA.  After Nicky enlists his help, Bourne discovers via the documents that his father helped to create the very same secret program that enlisted his son.  However, via flashbacks that begin to haunt Bourne, we discover that Bourne's father was killed in a violent terrorist attack in the Middle East.  Bourne soon begins to realize, however, that this father's death may not have been at the hands of a terrorist, but rather from his employers in the CIA, giving Bourne this film's vendetta to find the men responsible for his father's death.

Unfortunately, Bourne's vendetta is much too similar to everything we saw in the first three films of the series.  Rather than feel fresh, Jason Bourne ends up seeming like a repeat of everything we've seen.  The film certainly isn't awful -- Damon is good and the cast surrounding him works well together -- but it's too much of the same thing.  Tommy Lee Jones as the CIA head takes the place of David Strathairn and Chris Cooper's characters.  Alicia Vikander as the understanding, friendly CIA agent is Joan Allen's Pamela Landy.  Vincent Cassel as a hit man is like Clive Owen in the first film.  The script by Paul Greengrass and Christopher Rouse fails to do anything other than hit the notes that worked in the first three films.  Sure, the action sequences upped the ante -- including a decidedly un-Bourne-like Las Vegas chase scene that is so catastrophically damaging to the city that it feels like it was picked out from a Transformers movie -- but they're not enough to push the story to a fresh place.  You could certainly do worse when it comes to summer action flicks than Jason Bourne, but this final movie (thus far) in the Bourne series is unfortunately the worst.

The RyMickey Rating:  C