I finally watched Jason Bourne. It essentially ventures into self-parody... which doesn't really strike me as a bad thing. At least it's being honest about its own shortcomings and trappings. The original Bourne trilogy always struck me as overplaying its hand politically, but then again I doubt they ever planned on making more than one of them when they started.
The predictability (which is another thing that underlines the parody aspect) of the film is what makes it fail, ultimately, at least for me. I think I dozed off during the second car chase (screw car chases and everyone who likes them; you're all terrible people) before the ending where Bourne once again walks away as the rogue non-conformist while everyone else proves to be a part of the system. And you're left without a clear idea of what he was after, or why he ever was involved, or why the CIA wanted to put him down so badly.
There's a nice line about "the hack" in the beginning being "potentially as bad as Snowden", and the fact that the CIA didn't tear up half of Europe and executed people in public when Snowden fled of course speaks for itself. Chelsea Manning is by the same token alive today and known at least as much for her gender reassignment surgery as she is for the things she actually leaked. The big issue with spying and information gathering these days isn't that it's done by old, anonymous men in suits (who can honestly separate the characters that Scott Glenn, David Strathairn and Tommy Lee Jones played?) behind locked doors; it's that the lines between what's private, public and commercial have been blurred to the point where people don't really care. Bourne's modern cold war fiction was (and is) a good backdrop for a westernised version of asian martial arts*, but anyone looking for a takeaway message beyond the personal motivations of the characters must surely have been disappointed. And in the case of this film, even they were unclear.
I didn't care much personally; I came for the style and the punches and I left reasonably satisfied, frustrations over the formula aside.
(* I actually met the action stunt coordinator, Jeff Imada, a few years back during a PR thing. He's a Californian-born asian-american who studied Jeet Kune Do in the early 70s and got really close with Brandon Lee. He had a lot to say about that martial arts legacy and the way the original Bourne trilogy has tried to embody it. I think you can see it most clearly in the fight with the rolled-up magazine in the second or third film; it's dynamic and seems improvised, yet it's brutally efficient. It doesn't play out as the scriptured sequence of moves and hits which is so prevalent elsewhere today, especially in the Marvel and DC films.)
