Jason Bourne (2016)
Oh look, another film review.
Considering I was excited when I heard there was going to be another Bourne movie, that Damon, Greengrass and Stiles were returning and that Vikander was joining the cast, I am disappointed, and this is in a year when there have been a lot of disappointing sequels several years after the first film in a franchise got me invested.
The worst thing is? Nicky got killed, but you can’t even say she was fridged, as Jason basically angsted the most over his father’s death (and I was about as callous about him as Nicky’s hacker associate was about her). Damon and Greengrass got back together for this?
The new black ops project was...more electronic surveillance, which is all very dreadful and mass invasion of privacy blah blah blah, but moves away from the behavioural programming of individuals by Treadstone and Outcome to make them killers. And Nicky’s hack was supposedly ‘worse than Snowdon’? And yeah, yeah, relevant location choices referring to the 2008 crash, and returning to London and Berlin was meant to tie in with past films, but ending up in Vegas just made me think of Ocean’s 13, which is no good for anyone.
Basically, there was an emotional void at the core of this film. So Jason had turned to bare-knuckle fighting (not cage fighting? Pshaw) and was only surviving, not living, whereas Nicky had found a purpose on the run (yay Nicky!). But they dropped that for all the dead father stuff SNORE and the Agency trying to decide whether to kill Jason or bring him back in. I’ll just point out that they’ve never mentioned David Webb’s mother and how she felt about her babydaddy and son’s deaths, (and presume her name is Martha). But then, this film so failed the Bechdel test.
And yet, NICKY!!! I’d been starting to worry they would fridge her in the build up and from the trailer, and when I saw Stiles’s hair looked normal, I assumed it was going to be so - I wouldn’t change my hairstyle for this film. I was always a Jason/Marie shipper, but Nicky ending up off grid, on the run, having been through so much and knowing what she knew about Jason - I could be persuaded that they could find each other. (I suppose there are some gaps in all these years where you could posit a romantic relationship that never quite worked). But after judging the hacker for being so cold over her death, not a flicker from Jason. We were, like him, meant to be invested in his tribulations with mainly new characters and his father.
But Nicky’s death affected how I watched the rest of the film - I wanted it to be a revenge flick where Mr Asset, the Deputy Director of the Week and his lackeys, in which I include Heather Lee, whom they were trying to make sympathetic? - were all killed off for their part in Nicky’s execution. Rationally, I know she did pose a threat to their agency, but this is what I wanted from the film (I got two out of three and the film admitting ambitious Heather was in the black hat camp.)
What the film chose to be didn’t involve me at all.
Damon might have buffed up, but Jason looked rough in all the present day scenes - Cassel has aged much better. And the fact that they and Stiles have aged made it disappointing that the film had only superficially moved on from the original trilogy. Tommy Lee Jones was possibly too old to play his character, but did his doughty TLJ stuff, evil flavour, well enough to earn his paycheck. Vikander was fine - I had more of an issue with what they were trying to get the character to be, although I think they should have cast a slightly older actress with a convincing American accent, given that Heather was meant to be a contemporary with Riz Ahmed’s naive Aaron, who did have a convincing American accent.
The first vehicular chase scene was more involving, because Nicky and the countdown clock above her blonde hair were involved. By the time we got to Las Vegas, it was destructor time - and with less investment than in the previous films (I heart Legacy for allowing Marta to find her inner warrior) the long sequence, ending in hand-to-hand combat where Chiffre alluded to David’s Dead Daddy and awoke his killer instinct. Like much of what had come in between, it cleaved to the previous movie’s templates, as a visibly aged Bourne caused distractions and listened in to his hunters in this brave new world, and the returns they were diminished. When I’ve got over being mad at this, I’m probably going to ignore that it ever happened.
This entry was originally posted at http://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/244806.html.
Considering I was excited when I heard there was going to be another Bourne movie, that Damon, Greengrass and Stiles were returning and that Vikander was joining the cast, I am disappointed, and this is in a year when there have been a lot of disappointing sequels several years after the first film in a franchise got me invested.
The worst thing is? Nicky got killed, but you can’t even say she was fridged, as Jason basically angsted the most over his father’s death (and I was about as callous about him as Nicky’s hacker associate was about her). Damon and Greengrass got back together for this?
The new black ops project was...more electronic surveillance, which is all very dreadful and mass invasion of privacy blah blah blah, but moves away from the behavioural programming of individuals by Treadstone and Outcome to make them killers. And Nicky’s hack was supposedly ‘worse than Snowdon’? And yeah, yeah, relevant location choices referring to the 2008 crash, and returning to London and Berlin was meant to tie in with past films, but ending up in Vegas just made me think of Ocean’s 13, which is no good for anyone.
Basically, there was an emotional void at the core of this film. So Jason had turned to bare-knuckle fighting (not cage fighting? Pshaw) and was only surviving, not living, whereas Nicky had found a purpose on the run (yay Nicky!). But they dropped that for all the dead father stuff SNORE and the Agency trying to decide whether to kill Jason or bring him back in. I’ll just point out that they’ve never mentioned David Webb’s mother and how she felt about her babydaddy and son’s deaths, (and presume her name is Martha). But then, this film so failed the Bechdel test.
And yet, NICKY!!! I’d been starting to worry they would fridge her in the build up and from the trailer, and when I saw Stiles’s hair looked normal, I assumed it was going to be so - I wouldn’t change my hairstyle for this film. I was always a Jason/Marie shipper, but Nicky ending up off grid, on the run, having been through so much and knowing what she knew about Jason - I could be persuaded that they could find each other. (I suppose there are some gaps in all these years where you could posit a romantic relationship that never quite worked). But after judging the hacker for being so cold over her death, not a flicker from Jason. We were, like him, meant to be invested in his tribulations with mainly new characters and his father.
But Nicky’s death affected how I watched the rest of the film - I wanted it to be a revenge flick where Mr Asset, the Deputy Director of the Week and his lackeys, in which I include Heather Lee, whom they were trying to make sympathetic? - were all killed off for their part in Nicky’s execution. Rationally, I know she did pose a threat to their agency, but this is what I wanted from the film (I got two out of three and the film admitting ambitious Heather was in the black hat camp.)
What the film chose to be didn’t involve me at all.
Damon might have buffed up, but Jason looked rough in all the present day scenes - Cassel has aged much better. And the fact that they and Stiles have aged made it disappointing that the film had only superficially moved on from the original trilogy. Tommy Lee Jones was possibly too old to play his character, but did his doughty TLJ stuff, evil flavour, well enough to earn his paycheck. Vikander was fine - I had more of an issue with what they were trying to get the character to be, although I think they should have cast a slightly older actress with a convincing American accent, given that Heather was meant to be a contemporary with Riz Ahmed’s naive Aaron, who did have a convincing American accent.
The first vehicular chase scene was more involving, because Nicky and the countdown clock above her blonde hair were involved. By the time we got to Las Vegas, it was destructor time - and with less investment than in the previous films (I heart Legacy for allowing Marta to find her inner warrior) the long sequence, ending in hand-to-hand combat where Chiffre alluded to David’s Dead Daddy and awoke his killer instinct. Like much of what had come in between, it cleaved to the previous movie’s templates, as a visibly aged Bourne caused distractions and listened in to his hunters in this brave new world, and the returns they were diminished. When I’ve got over being mad at this, I’m probably going to ignore that it ever happened.
This entry was originally posted at http://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/244806.html.