By Erin Free
In The Bourne Identity – director Doug Liman’s slick, incisively intelligent 2002 adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s bestselling espionage novel – an injured man (Matt Damon) is rescued off the South coast of France, spotted floating unconscious in the rough seas. He wakes to the nightmare of profound amnesia, and the only clues to his identity are a Swiss bank account indicator embedded in his thigh, and two bullet holes in his back. As he struggles to regain his memory, he has to elude operatives and assassins hell bent on rubbing him out. As the film barrels on at a relentless pace, this shattered but lethal man learns that his name is Jason Bourne, and that he is a master assassin. Across three equally gripping and ingeniously constructed sequels from director, Paul Greengrass – 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, and this week’s Jason Bourne – Jason Bourne desperately tries to both escape from, and learn about, his past.
Tough, resourceful, resilient, and highly dangerous, Bourne is being constantly pursued by covert forces, and he outsmarts them at every turn. “We never want him to be assisted by technology,” Matt Damon told FilmInk in 2007. “That’s a James Bond thing, and Bourne is very anti-technology. The people coming after him have all the technology. He’s not someone who relies on that. I also really enjoy the fact that Bourne is never in disguise. He can walk across borders with a different passport and nobody ever stops him, and that’s true too. Borders are porous.”
As played with such intense physicality by Matt Damon (“I’m not a typical action movie person, but it’s really helpful if I can do most of the stunts because audiences are so smart now, and they can tell if it’s a stuntman or the actor”), Jason Bourne is always dynamic to watch. Tough and decent – but with all manner of emotional baggage – he’s the best kind of movie hero. By the end of The Bourne Ultimatum, this lethal assassin also comes with a considerable dose of pathos. “The only story that we had left to tell, in Bourne’s pursuit of his identity was, ‘How did I become who I am? Was I a born killer, or did they make me a killer?’ Once we agreed that that was the dramatic thrust of the movie, it became the focus of the film,” Damon told FilmInk. It’s that growing realisation in The Bourne Ultimatum – that Jason Bourne is just a man caught up in the shifting gears of a government organisation more concerned with results than people – that makes this master assassin so much more than just an action hero. He’s complex, haunted and ultimately tragic, and in Jason Bourne, Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass drill down deep, and reveal even more about him. “I just love the character,” Damon told FilmInk, echoing the sentiments of moviegoers everywhere.
Jason Bourne is released in cinemas on July 28.
