By Jackie Shannon

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 two equally gripping and ingeniously constructed sequels from director, Paul Greengrass – 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum – 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. And now he’s back in the simply titled Jason Bourne, which hits cinemas on July 28. “Jason Bourne isn’t a superhero; he doesn’t wear a cape or a mask,” says director, Paul Greengrass. “He’s not one of those kinds of guys. He is just an ordinary man. I think that when people watch Jason Bourne, they can imagine how they might react in those situations and those circumstances, and when you see him thinking his way through and coming up with a plan and executing his plan, that’s incredibly exciting. It has taken us a long time to come back because we didn’t have the right story before. The world needed to change, and then there comes that moment when it makes sense. You know when it feels right and that’s when you do it, not before.” 

Jason Bourne is released in cinemas on July 28.

Shares:

Leave a Reply