Jason Bourne - 2 smiles

Jason Bourne has always had one mission: to find out who he is. He was a human killing machine who operated on intuition and impulse and by the end of Paul Greengrass' 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon's spy finally got answers. But nearly 10 years later, Bourne is dragged out of hiding and given more questions to ponder. In Greengrass' "Jason Bourne," the film ignores the events of the Jeremy Renner-led The Bourne Legacy, and picks up almost a decade after Damon's character fled New York after being shot by the former CIA Deputy Director. Greengrass opens this movie with a flashback sequence of Bourne's last moments with his father. Then we discover he's living off the radar and earning money with underground fights. Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) is working for a hacker in Iceland when she hacks into CIA files and discovers a new training program, Ironhand. She also discovers that Bourne's father had connections to Treadstone. So, of course, Bourne is sucked back into searching for information. The new CIA is led by Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) wth the assistance of hacker Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) and they are after Parsons and Bourne to stop them from leaking info about Ironhand. CIA hitman (Vincent Cassel) is hot on their trail.

Although we are happy to have another Jason Bourne movie, the additional backstory about his father is too thin to garner interest and is ignored for much of the runtime. It's been nine years since Matt Damon played this iconic character and Damon looks tired. Maybe it's because Bourne's gotten older, but it also speaks to the superfluous plot. It all seems so redundant and, dare I say it, pointless. On the other hand, "Jason Bourne" does what all Bourne movies do best - action. There's an intense car chases through the streets of Athens, edgy hand-to-hand fights and an over-the-top chase through the Las Vegas strip that demolishes more cars than all previous films. The reunion between Greengrass and Damon should have resulted in a better movie.