Jason Bourne opened in cinemas on July 27, 2016, ten years ago this week, arriving nearly a decade after The Bourne Ultimatum sent the character underground. Paul Greengrass returned to direct, and Matt Damon put the character back on screen for the first time since 2007, following one entry in the series, The Bourne Legacy, that had tried to carry on without either of them.
The story catches up with Bourne years into hiding, before new CIA leadership, played by Tommy Lee Jones and Alicia Vikander, drags him back into a hunt for the truth about his own recruitment. Julia Stiles returns as Nicky Parsons, Vincent Cassel plays an operative sent after Bourne, and Riz Ahmed appears as a tech entrepreneur caught between his product and the government's demands. Greengrass wrote the script with his longtime editor Christopher Rouse, the first writing credit either of them had taken on the series.
Reception split in a way the earlier films rarely had to deal with. Jason Bourne sits at 55% on Rotten Tomatoes, 58 on Metacritic and 6.6 on IMDb, numbers that point to a real disagreement rather than consensus. Critics who admired Greengrass's handheld chaos in the original trilogy felt this entry ran on momentum more than story, moving fast without giving its characters quite enough to actually fight about. The craft itself, the propulsive editing and the sense of a world closing in on its hero, held up even when the writing didn't.
What gives the anniversary some real weight is why Greengrass and Damon came back at all. Both had said publicly they would only make another Bourne film if they found a story worth telling, and what brought them back was the argument that followed Edward Snowden's NSA revelations, folded into the plot as a covert program harvesting personal data through a private tech company. That tied the film to a specific moment in the surveillance debate, and ten years on, the moment has not really passed. The opening sequence also drops Bourne into a riot that plays like real news footage, staged with the same documentary instinct Greengrass built earlier in his career.
None of that makes Jason Bourne the strongest film in the series, but it makes it a more interesting rewatch than its reputation suggests, a Bourne film that is genuinely about the year it came out. Ten years later, that is still a good reason to put it back on.
