Jason Bourne

July 31, 2016 - Matt Damon is a man of few words in this fourth installment in the Jason Bourne saga. Instead, he's all action – throwing punches, shooting bullets, and driving fast and furiously while being chased by a CIA asset. Julia Stiles returns for another go-round. The cast also includes Tommy Lee Jones, Vincent Cassel and Alicia Vikander. Damon gets a producing credit. Paul Greengrass, who directed The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, directs and co-wrote the script.

It's been nearly 10 years since we last saw Jason Bourne. In The Bourne Ultimatum, he finally remembered his true identity and recalled the CIA program that turned him into a super-assassin. Since then, Bourne has apparently been fight clubbing his way across Europe while former CIA analyst Nicky Parsons (Stiles) has been busy hacking into CIA databases to find out more about Bourne's background.

Her final hack, however, gets the attention of a young CIA go-getter named Heather Lee (Vikander). She manages to trace the hack and implant malware in the stolen files. That bit of technical prowess sets off a wild chain of events that goes from (let's see if I can remember them all) Athens to Berlin to London to Las Vegas to Washington, DC with a couple of epic chase sequences along the way.

Overall review: *** This movie runs just over two hours. That leaves plenty of time for plenty of chases, all of which seem to pass through very crowded streets. The film sure needs all those chases because there's not much dialogue to speak of. Having said that, it's a Jason Bourne movie, so what do you expect? The film does leave open the possibility of a fifth installment, and based on early box office numbers, I bet it won't be another 10 years until we see Jason Bourne again.