Loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s hit novel, The Bourne Identity at face value does not seem much different from other spy thrillers of the early 2000s, but Matt Damon’s performance as Jason Bourne as he slowly unravels the mystery of his identity keeps the audience thoroughly invested.

All he knows is that, somehow, he possesses unbelievable mental and physical abilities that make him a danger to others, and the CIA wants him dead. Matt Damon plays a man who does not know who he is or what he was doing in the ocean when a French fishing boat pulled him out of the water. While Paul Greengrass’ direction of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum gave audiences a taste of what the action genre could be, the first chapter of Jason Bourne’s onscreen adventures from Doug Liman gave audiences a taste of the action star Matt Damon could be. The bottom line with Jason Bourne for me, though, is that Robert Ludlum’s original book series began with The Bourne Identity and ended with The Bourne Ultimatum and perhaps the films should have also kept it that way. Sounds a bit like a familiar request to Apple from the FBI in 2016, doesn’t it?Įssentially, the fifth entry in the Jason Bourne franchise is an egregiously forced excuse to see Matt Damon kick butt again with cheaper imitations of the series’ definitive action spliced with needless, ham-fisted political commentary. Meanwhile, CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, trying to be the new Joan Allen’s Pam Landy) has a plan to enact a secret partnership with the founder of a growing technology company (Riz Ahmed) to allow the CIA backdoor access to every one of its customers’ cell phones.

Jason Bourne discovers from Julia Stiles’ Nicky Parsons that his father was involved in the creation of Treadstone, the program that made Bourne into an assassin, prompting him to angrily reopen his war on the CIA. Jason Bourne has two different plots happening simultaneously that are given no real reason to correlate with one another, yet they all too conveniently do. As such, fans were on cloud nine upon announcement that the duo would re-team for 2016’s Jason Bourne… until they saw it. Matt Damon said on record that the only way he would return for another Jason Bourne movie after The Bourne Ultimatum would be if director Paul Greengrass agreed to return, too.

Jason bourne movies in order on netflix