YMMV / Jason Bourne

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Whether or not Heather Lee is ever genuinely heroic in her actions aiding Bourne—or merely an entirely selfish power play to remove Dewey—and whether or not her declaration at the end to either turn Bourne or "put him down" is a sincere reflection of her intentions, or she was just telling her boss what she thought he wanted to hear and didn't realize Bourne was listening. The article about her saying she "joined the CIA because [she] wanted to make a difference" implies she believes in doing good, but whether or not she believes in the methods is left ambiguous. Heather playing Russell in the end could easily be because she wants Dewey's job and really doesn't care about what the CIA has to do with Bourne or anyone else, but leaning into the angle of "making a difference", Heather could be genuinely deceiving him with the purpose of having to keep playing the game because it's the only way to "make a difference"—especially with the black ops programs continuing to re-emerge regardless of the exposure.
• Complete Monster:
  • CIA Director Robert Dewey, the Big Bad of the film and the Greater-Scope Villain of the series, seeks to gain total control over the private lives of the American public. In the past, Dewey was one of the top minds behind Operation Treadstone, which used torture and brainwashing to turn U.S. servicemen into dangerous assassins. When Treadstone founder and Jason Bourne's father Richard Webb found out that Dewey had his sights set on his son, he tried to shut down the program and go public about it, only for Dewey to order his assassination in a False Flag Operation before manipulating Jason into enlisting. Going on to oversee other shady government projects, Dewey spearheads an operation known as Iron Hand, which uses a backdoor in the highly popular social network platform Deep Dream to violate the privacy of millions of American citizens, and has Jason's friend Nicky Parsons assassinated when she tries to leak info about it to the public. When Jason takes up Nicky's cause, Dewey hunts him, showing his ruthlessness by having his own agents callously killed and threatening the safety of a former CIA employee's family should the man reveal anything to Bourne during a violent interrogation. During the film's climax, Dewey tries to use another false flag terrorist operation to kill both CIA employee Heather Lee and his own co-conspirator Aaron Kalloor for undermining his authority.
  • The Asset, Dewey's chief henchman, is first seen during the chase scene in Athens, where he murders several bystanders just to set up a sniper nest with which to ambush Bourne and Nicky. The Asset later derails Heather Lee's attempt to make contact with Bourne by murdering his fellow CIA operatives sent to monitor the meeting, callously disregarding the fact that they are his comrades and that they have nothing to do with his beef with Bourne. Finally, after failing in his attempt to assassinate Kalloor and Lee in Vegas, the Asset murders a LVMP SWAT officer, hijacks his SWAT truck, and charges it straight into a traffic full of civilian cars just to put a few yards of distance from Bourne. In the climactic fight with Bourne, the Asset denounces Bourne as "a traitor, always has been a traitor," even though he's the one who railroaded Bourne into the CIA by using a car bomb to kill Bourne's father, a loyal CIA employee, and attributing it to a terrorist organization.
• Contested Sequel: It's either a decent installment in the franchise, or a disappointment that in spite of bringing back Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass brought nothing new to the table.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Iron Hand, a program for the government to track billions of people using phone apps after the March 2017 Vault 7 leaks revealed the CIA has not only been using popular apps like Whatsapp to track and spy on people, they've been installing backdoors and hoarding weakpoints in various digital architecture like iphone to allow them to spy on anyone they want while compromising the security of Americans in not revealing the weakpoints for correction as they're legally expected.
• He's Just Hiding: That Julia Stiles returned to play Nicky again for The Bourne Stuntacular at Universal Studios—after this movie too—lends itself to the theory that she somehow didn't get killed here and will show up alive again in another one someday too.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The common complaint of Jason Bourne by critics; while it was expected to play some of the series' troperiffic hits, the lack of deviation from formula made the movie feel uninspired to critics, especially with well-received films like Skyfall, Mad Max: Fury Road, John Wick, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation having raised the action bar in the nine-year Bourne hiatus. To list a few:
  • The first act chase scene echoes almost beat for beat the India and Waterloo Station chase scenes of the prior movies, making it very easy to discern that Nicky Parsons, like Marie and Simon Ross before her, was not long for the movie.
  • An esteemed older, white male actor asked to do nothing but bark orders in a CIA control room and growl about killing Jason Bourne, here Tommy Lee Jones taking the mantle from Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, and David Strathairn before him.
  • The CIA running yet another thinly-veiled black-ops program under another name, this time "Iron Hand".
  • Jason still learning the origin of his assassin life; this time, he learns his father helped created Treadstone.
  • The requisite heavy-traffic car chase and code-named elite assassin on Jason's trail. Granted, at least this time Bourne is the one doing the chasing.
  • A sequel hook that reveals Bourne is still not free of the CIA's wishes to terminate him.
• Magnificent Bastard: Heather Lee is the ambitious, but well-meaning, head of the CIA Cyber Ops Division seeking to advance in the ranks of the agency. She first identifies and locates rogue agent Nicky Parsons as the one who stole the black ops files from Treadstone to Iron Hand, tracks her and has a small part in her death too. Heather is able to download malware into the files so she can trace them later on and then use a phone in the same room as an encrypted computer to delete the files. Heather seeks to convince Jason Bourne to return to the CIA as a valuable assassin rather than have him killed and when she learns of how corrupt both Director Robert Dewey and the Asset are, Heather helps Bourne sneak back to America through Las Vegas. When Heather realizes they are under suspicion, she alerts Bourne, later saves Bourne herself by killing Dewey and then once again tries to take power using her influence with Bourne, only for him to just barely outsmart her.
• Memetic Mutation: "Jesus Christ, that's Jason Bourne."
• Moral Event Horizon: Dewey crosses this when he ordered the death of Jason's father because he intended to blab. He just got worse from there.
• Narm:
  • Nicky's lines are incredibly important, as her actions cause the main conflict of the movie, yet for some reason Julia Stiles' line delivery is stilted and unnatural, sounding strangely like video game dialogue.
  • CIA apparently texts only using caps lock.
• Shocking Moments: The big car chase in Las Vegas is filled with this. One moment that stands out is when a hijacked SWAT van plows through cars.
• Signature Scene: Two notable scenes: the chase through anti-austerity demonstrations in Athens and the climactic Las Vegas car chase.
• Tear Jerker: Just like when Jason lost Marie, he loses Nicky, his closest ally, as well. Hirsch was right about the fact that he cannot outrun what he did, and this is clearly evident in this moment. And even worse, Jason Bourne has been looking for revenge once, and you wouldn't want to see what happens when it is done twice...
  Jason: THE NEXT BULLET'S IN YOUR HEAD!
• Win Back the Crowd: The announcement of the return of Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass returning for this movie was enough to win back Bourne fans who were not impressed by The Bourne Legacy. Subsequent trailers and TV spots have ended up amplifying the hype for the true return of Jason Bourne.

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