Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Horrible plot.  Lazy story.  Some good action.

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is retired from retiring from retiring from retiring from trying to find out the truth about Operation Treadstone.  He spends his days looking disgruntled and knocking out menacing looking brutes in one punch in back-desert prize fighting matches.  Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) is working for a brilliant hacker who wants to use information he finds to bring down The Man.  She spends her days breaking into hacking collectives and using their resources to hack into CIA databases gaining access to more than enough information to bring down The Man and inexplicably relocating Jason Bourne because she found an extra tidbit on Treadstone that he might be interested.  We’ll ignore the fast that she could just have gotten this information to Bourne by releasing it into the wild and accomplishing what she set out to do in the first place because otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie.

Maybe we shouldn’t have a movie, though.  I mean, if you’re going to make a spy thriller, can you at least make your super spies act even remotely competent at their job?  In a world where you know facial recognition is everywhere, can you at least make an attempt to blend in, Nicky?  Maybe a baseball cap?  Or at least dress like you didn’t just come off of a runway in Paris?  I know this is all Hollywood objectification of women BS.  If you’re going to be a woman, you have to look good and stand out even if you should be going for the exact opposite.

Then there’s The Asset (Vincent Cassel), a man who has such an axe to grind with Bourne that he should never be put on the mission to eliminate Bourne to begin with.  You see, Bourne released sensitive data that compromised CIA programs and led to The Asset’s capture.  He cannot forgive Bourne for putting CIA personnel at risk.  So of course he starts racking up a CIA body count larger than anything Bourne ever did just so that he could get to Bourne and kill him.  Makes perfect sense.  And don’t even get me started on CIA Director Robert Dewey (played skeletally by Tommy Lee Jones).

The only redeeming thing about this movie is some of the action sequences are pretty cool.  That is not nearly enough to recommend spending time nor treasure on this movie.  Hopefully, Jason Bourne forgets about Treadstone for good from this point on.