“I know who I am,” says Bourne. “I remember everything.”
Jason Bourne fans have been waiting a long time since the release of the last Bourne film starring Matt Damon. Bourne Ultimatum came out in 2007 with Bourne still on the run from the CIA after escaping the black ops program into which he was inducted as a young man. Now Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass are back, partnering together on another summer mega-blockbuster with all the car chases and fight scenes fans have been waiting for.
At the start of the movie, Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles, familiar to viewers from other Bourne films) hacks into the CIA files in Iceland and learns about Bourne’s induction into the Treadstone program. She finds Bourne on the run, fighting for a living, and meets up with him in the middle of a political protest in a city square in Greece.
Unfortunately, Parsons’ hack was intercepted by the CIA cyber ops director, the young and ambitious Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), and she sends CIA agents to the scene to intercept Parsons and Bourne. They are partially successful, but not before Parsons passes off information to Bourne about his father, the CIA analyst who started the Treadstone program and was subsequently killed in a car bombing.
With this new information, Bourne suspects his father’s death was not an accident, and begins to track down more information through the files Parsons gave him. Meanwhile, Lee and the CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) are tracking Bourne, but Lee begins to work independently from Dewey when she realizes she might be able to convince Bourne to come back in under the CIA again. She begins to send information to Bourne to protect him from Dewey’s plans, which ultimately lead to a showdown in Las Vegas.
My husband and I are big fans of Matt Damon’s Bourne movies, and we were not disappointed on Saturday night at the theatre. The film offers everything that aficionados love about the series: a tortured hero who is always one step ahead of the agency, the (imagined) look inside some of the most secretive corners of U.S. government, the international travel and intrigue, the assassins with their personal vendettas, the jaw-dropping car chases and white-knuckle fight scenes, and — as always — the surprise ending and promise of more to come in the series (yes!). As my husband said, “It’s always fun when a long-anticipated sequel lives up to the hype!”
This is a long-anticipated film that delivers all that it promised it would. Go catch Bourne while he’s still at the Village Theatre!
Movie times: click here
Genre: Thriller/Action
Director: Paul Greengrass
Actors: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Julia Stiles, Vincent Cassel
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hours 3 minutes
