

Greengrass rights the frame before knocking it off-kilter again, as if he’s momentarily clearing your head. He isn’t a free-floating action director like Luc Besson, for whom gravity isn’t a constant. He creates teeming, claustrophobia-inducing frames, with the action off-center.

How many jason bourne movies is there series#
Coming back to the series after nine years, director Paul Greengrass clearly knew he had to beat all those Bourne imitations, those cookie-cutter thrillers shot with jittery cameras in the style of documentaries. Jason Bourne isn’t much more fun than Damon is - it’s too assaultive and humorless. It’s in service to the film, though, which he co-produced, and from which he’ll make more than you would in ten lifetimes. So he turns his face into a mask of stoicism and gives the dullest performance of his career. Enemy of the State (1998) demonstrated how far surveillance had come in a mere two decades, and the Bourne movies suggest that only a superman (Nietzschean and DC-ian) has a chance against the high-tech hive mind that is the modern Central Intelligence Agency.Īs an actor, Matt Damon has too much integrity to pretend he can multitask to that advanced degree and still be, you know, a fun person. It’s a lot to hold in one’s brain - far more than it was for, say, the innocent man played by Robert Redford in the seminal 1975 paranoid conspiracy thriller, Three Days of the Condor, who only had to cope with a sad-faced Max von Sydow, a bogus mailman, and Faye Dunaway’s bad temper. To evade the watchers, Bourne must anticipate their watching, watch them back, and also, if possible, listen to them - which means bugging them while they’re watching him.

To survive, he must also reckon with an incalculable number of cameras pointing this way and that in search of him, and on his image being beamed to people across an ocean with the desire and personnel to kill him, quickly. It’s not enough that Bourne, the ex-CIA assassin turned pariah, can box, kung-fu fight, and drive at high speeds on the wrong side of the road. Whatever it does or doesn’t accomplish as a piece of entertainment, the fourth Matt Damon Jason Bourne film - imaginatively entitled Jason Bourne - makes a strong evolutionary case for multitasking.
