DAMON. Humanizes his actioner’s tumultuous proceedings.
Fans of the “Jason Bourne” film franchise are feeling “solved” this season, because signature star Matt Damon has “succumbed” to entreaties to topbill a new installment of the edge-of-your-seat espionage thriller, despite its attendant aches and pains.
Damon isn’t getting any younger, so all that additional wear and tear must have been murder on his “maturing” frame, but he stuck to his guns with true grit.
Heroics
His heroics are helped a lot by the fact that he has an especially sinister and crafty foe in the film’s central eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation in no less than the CIA’s chief, portrayed with cool yet rancid evil by Tommy Lee Jones.
Adding to the mounting tension and terror are the supporting portrayals turned in by younger actors like Alicia Vikander and Julia Stiles in key roles.
Their exposure here augurs well for the development of their respective careers, which we expect will culminate in their own stellar success.
All told, however, the lead and supporting actors’ characterizations were trumped by the film’s visuals, which were even more pumped up than usual in the “Jason Bourne” canon.
We still prefer the relative realism and sparseness of the installment in which Bourne leaped from a building into a window in another towering structure—with the camera (and presumably its operator) leaping across with him!
This new film doesn’t have a singular stupendous shot like that, but it makes up for that slack by way of many visually stunning setups and chases involving high-tech flourishes and trickery.
“Jason Bourne’s” own striking visual concept explodes into furious action in its slam-bang finale, when the careening car chase plows through many other vehicles, mowing them down like a huge pile of crashing, thrashing dominoes!
When all is said and undone, however, the most memorably telling “moments” in the production are the personal glints and hints that manage to survive all that visual car-rage, because they perform the all-important task of humanizing the tumultuous proceedings.
These include Bourne’s belated discovery of the heretofore secret reason why his father was killed, who the dastardly murderer was, etc.
In those more personal scenes, Damon’s proven thespic acuity (“The Martian”) kicks in nicely and revs the film dynamically up, all the way to its slam-bang finale.