Jason Bourne

A more appropriate title for Jason Bourne might be Walking: The Motion Picture. This fifth entry in the franchise loosely (very loosely) based on Robert Ludlum's best-selling novels brings back director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon to continue the tale of the good soldier-turned-amnesiac-assassin-turned-rogue agent doing battle against his former overlords at the CIA. But mostly it's about people walking. Walking down corridors, through hotels, through streets, through backrooms. Always briskly, always with apparent purpose, often with phones or earpieces or tracking devices so they can talk to someone else who is also walking and who is usually telling them where yet another person might be walking.

To be fair, there was walking in the other films, too -- lots of it. But it wasn't distracting, because those films each had an overall shape, an animating spirit and sense of drive. Jason Bourne goes over ground very similar to its predecessors, minus the poetic urgency of Bourne's quest for self-discovery -- a critical element. This time, he tries to track down the truth about his father's involvement in the clandestine super-spy program that made Bourne, all while CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones), covering up his own secrets, dispatches an assassin referred to as "The Asset" (a mostly silent Vincent Cassel) to find Bourne and do away with him. The performances are competently unimpressive, and Jason Bourne offers very little in the way of imaginative or innovative standoffs, confrontations or chases.