Jason Bourne

Aside from Jason Bourne and Nicky Parsons, nobody has returned from the previous entries. Whether Aaron Cross and Dr. Marta Shearing got to keep their happy ending or Pamela Landy was ultimately tried for treason is never addressed, and Noah Vosen’s ultimate fate is equally unclear. While the former two can be excused (either they died or they’re enjoying their lives in hiding), the lack of reference to Noah Vosen is minorly annoying. After all, Pamela Landy is one of the few characters to appear in more than two films, and her war against Noah Vosen seemed poised to go nuclear politically. On the other hand, Jason Bourne dives straight into the nitty gritty aspects of being on the run and how a desire to fight back can fester after years of indignities.

Nicky Parsons has spent the last decade or so building up her criminal reputation through her work with a notorious hacktivist, Christian Dassault (Vinzenz Kiefer). We track her in Reykjavík as she slips into a den of hackers to use a computer they have compromised from the CIA that is straight out of the nineties (if not the early 2000s), gathering critical intelligence on the litany of operations that have followed since Treadstone’s inception. With the CIA having grown sharper teeth in the last twelve years, they easily trace the source of the hack. They are able to follow Nicky to Greece as she makes every effort to draw Jason Bourne back in to finish what they started so long ago. Despite seeming poised to be a major player once more, Nicky’s storyline and the intelligence she managed to get her hands on fails to go anywhere meaningful as a part of her boss’ goals. This is because what Nicky gleaned from the information is far more personal than she could have anticipated. The origins of Treadstone lay firmly with the Webb family.

Instead, Alicia Vikander is the female lead for Jason Bourne. Playing Heather Lee, an ambitious cybersecurity operations division head, she is the one who effortlessly pulls all of the disparate threads together into a coherent picture. The current Director of the CIA, Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones), like all who came before him, is wary of Jason Bourne’s involvement and had a hand in Treadstone and Blackbriar, which implies that he is one of the last men standing from the old guard. Together, they work to button this situation up, but both have radically different approaches and diametrically opposing agendas. Where Heather is insistent that she can do what the rest failed to and bring Jason Bourne back home, Dewey is outwardly helpful while secretly seeking to eliminate Jason as quickly as possible. Taking a page out of Ward Abbott’s playbook, this means that Dewey is not above executing CIA operatives who are in his way (read, Heather’s entire team) and then laying the failure of the operation at her feet.

Similarly to The Bourne Legacy, and much like our own world, the CIA has branched out to include corporate America in its black ops programs. Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed) is heavily involved in Dewey’s pet project, providing the backbone of the CIA’s new surveillance programs while simultaneously preaching about how secure and private his system is to his customers. As an amalgamation of tech and social network CEOs – like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk – Kalloor mirrors today’s societal obsession with privacy and its equal efforts to subvert it.

This puts him squarely in Dewey’s crosshairs, reminding us that in this world, the CIA (and, by extension, the US Government) is more than willing to assassinate citizens of our own country as much as it will citizens of allied nations.

What separates Jason Bourne from its preceding sequels is that it comes at a time of legacy sequels and reboots. Thus, Some plot beats are referenced and subverted throughout this entry. Nicky’s trajectory parallels Marie’s, for example. Heather acts as a cross between Pamela and Noah in her mission to bring Jason in while also carefully overseeing the operation as it goes south because of outside interference. Yet, Heather is the one left standing by the end; even if her methods of weaving her way through the crises and the conspiracies seem guided by the plot, she is the one who ensures her survival and her success.

Every Bourne film features a slew of antagonists who cross paths with Jason, and the Asset (Vincent Cassel) is the most effective. A former operative for Blackbriar who is in the process of transitioning to its new operation, Iron Hand. He has a vendetta against Bourne for exposing Blackbriar all those years ago. However, the fact that he survived is an interesting story, as is how Eric Byer had them all eliminated. Like Kirill, he proves to be lethally effective in executing the assignments given to him, dispatching Jason’s allies left and right throughout the film and slowing down Jason’s investigation. By the time the pair comes to blows, it’s not always clear which of them will come out on top, making each battle harrowing.

Craig Jeffers (Ato Essandoh) is a CIA operative who acts as Dewey’s righthand man. While Dewey is more than willing to pick up a gun and use it, Craig acts as Dewey’s main protective force throughout the film. This makes Dewey unique because no other major antagonists have somebody like Craig on their side. Mostly, the main villains do not cross paths with Jason Bourne until the stage is set for their demise, literally or politically. Those allies of theirs were not combat-oriented, and Craig gave it a good go for their fight scene.

While that does not mean this will be the actual finale, like its predecessors, it works well as a closing chapter to the preceding films.