Jason Bourne

As expected, Jason Bourne topped the box office in its opening weekend, but like so many of the sequels released this summer, the initial numbers aren’t quite what everyone was hoping for. This doesn’t mean we should count out Matt Damon’s return to his most popular character just yet, but it does add more fuel to the “audiences are getting a little picky with the sequels they will pay to see” narrative that has been forming over the past few months.

Flashback to four or five years ago and it seemed like the idea of another Matt Damon-led Jason Bourne movie was a bit of a pipe dream. How things change. Not only did Jason Bourne open in theaters this weekend, but according to Entertainment Weekly (via Heroic Hollywood), Damon would be open to coming back for even more Jason Bourne sequels.

When you think of the ‘Bourne’ trilogy, one thing comes to mind: action. And not just any kind of action, but frantic, dizzying, jagged, or for those sitting to close to the movie theater screen, headache-inducing action.

The Jason Bourne franchise has always operated as a sort of response to the James Bond series. Right as Bond hit one of his lowest and silliest depths in Die Another Day in 2002, The Bourne Identity arrived on the scene as a sort of corrective; serious, dark, morally tortured. The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum followed, and so did 007, whose Casino Royale and especially Quantum of Solace aped the style and tone of Bourne.

Jason Bourne has always had one mission: to find out who he is. It’s a mystery that made him one of the most enthralling action movie characters. He didn’t have the suave, ostentatiousness of James Bond, nor did he rely on teamwork or gadgets like Ethan Hunt; he was quick, efficient and acted on intuition and impulse alone, and all without having a clue what his real name was. He was a human killing machine who wouldn’t stop until he uncovered the truth, and by the end of Paul Greengrass’ 2007 ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’, Matt Damon’s spy finally got answers. But nearly 10 years later, Bourne still has questions.

If you’re like me, even after all these years, you can still remember everything that happened in The Bourne Identity pretty clearly. It’s when you get to The Bourne Supremacy that things start to get a little fuzzy. I remember an early scene in the second film where Matt Damon’s Bourne and Franka Potente’s Marie are ambushed by Karl Urban’s Treadstone assassin, and then some sort of car chase in an Eastern European city, but that’s about the last major plot point I can keep straight in my head. Was Brian Cox in the second film? Didn’t the third film have some sort of investigative journalist? Did Bourne actually ever get his memory back in the three films? Does The Bourne Legacy even matter at all?

Jason Bourne has never been a verbose character, but in his long-awaited return to the big-screen he really puts the silent in “strong, silent type.”

Here at ScreenCrush, we’ve made no secret of the fact that we think 2016 has been a disappointing year for summer movies. With everything from The BFG to Warcraft: The Beginning struggling in theaters, the evidence is stacking up that 2016 might be the worse year for summer movies, ever. Still, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon: both Star Trek Beyond and Jason Bourne come out this month, and those two franchises have historically managed to balance smarts and action in equal amounts.

I have a dream job. What could be better than watching and talking about movies for a living? Nothing; the answer is nothing. But lately my job has been a lot less fun than normal, because the movies themselves have been a lot less fun. Quite frankly, this summer sucks.

“The call is for you.” A stranger drops a phone in your lap. It starts ringing. You answer to a man’s voice but he calls you Steven. He sounds desperate. “I’m gonna ask you something and I need the answer to be yes.” You’re not Steven. What do you do?