Theme: Amnesia

Jason Bourne (2016) – Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones and Alicia Vikander

This movie gets off to a strong start with an engaging, rich-action, rich-plot set of inital scenes, and the return of Matt Damon (as Jason Bourne). We’re also treated to the return of an aging Julia Stiles (as Nicky Parsons) although she’s killed quite early, on top being treated to the additions of an aged Tommy Lee Jones (from Men In Black, acting here as Robert Dewey, CIA boss) and Alicia Vikander (star of Ex Machina 2014, joining us here as Heather Lee, CIA team leader – responsible for tracking down Bourne & Parsons).

Having said that, once the strong first 10 minutes are out of the way, the next 10 minutes are little more than messy irritating noise and moodfest. But this builds into a decent action scene around half an hour in.

In the end, with its mix of strong-ish bits and extended weak patches, with a strong-ish cast and decent genre, I’m going to rate this movie just Above Average.

The Bourne Legacy (2012) – Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz

15 minutes in and we’ve had nothing but boring political drama. No action, and not an action hero in sight – at least not a credible one we can remotely admire. This movie series has really turned to faeces since Matt Damon called it a day.

The drama is kind of watchable but one may lose patience with it.

By half an hour in there’s been a little action, but it’s only mild.

Fortunately the action does get a little interesting in the second half hour, but it soon goes back to its boring political drama show waffle.

The star of the show this time round, while not receiving much screen time early on, is Jeremy Renner who seems like some kind of dollarstore Daniel Craig and I’m no Daniel Craig fan! Renner plays the archer in the Marvel Avengers movies. He’s no action hero though – he’s literally the worst one in those movies by a country mile.

In the second hour it becomes clear where the motivation for this sub-standard movie came from: it’s pushing transhumanism via virology, thus killing two birds with one stone. Hats off to Matt Damon for wanting no part of it — that’s one better than Statham who totally shilled for virology in his cool Transporter trilogy.

Rachel Weisz plays the lead female and does a respectable job of it.

Although the action did pick up in the second half of the movie, it never reached the level of the first good action scene from shortly after half an hour in. The action is a bit dull and one dimensional, and of course led by a sub-par star, so in the end I’m going to settle on a So-So rating here.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) – Matt Damon

Much like the previous movie in the series, this one has some cool bits and a lot of grit between times, with some very dark low-contrast scenes, a lot of flicking camerawork, and a lot of messy fussy suspense-style action-drama with irritating persistent musical effects. So it deserves a similar rating to the last one: just Below Average.

The Bourne Supremacy (2004) – Matt Damon

This movie gets off to a slower, more boring start than the original. Obviously there’s no cool new creative plot to get going with, since the cat’s out the bag, but good sequels usually manage to come up with some originality — this one is lacking.

The fight scene around 40 minutes in is quite memorable for how bad it is. If there were an award for worst fight scene, it would be that. The camera literally doesn’t stay still for half a second, much of the time. It’s clear from the previous movie that Matt Damon can’t fight, and clear from early on in this movie that he’s a plodding flat-footed runner, but if this fight scene really magnifies the problem by being so terribly coordinated and filmed with the worst kind of constant flickering possible in order to mask the lack of substance — a common fight choreography tactic but this is really the worst case example of it. Immediately after that fight scene though, the quick trick Bourne does to lose his tail and mash up the crime scene is tactically on point and well executed — there’s life in the old dog yet (the Bourne saga).

There’s a very cool bit from about 45 minutes in, when Jason cleverly tracks down the agent in charge of tracking him down. It only lasts a few minutes before the mood dampens again, but worked very well while it lasted — it had great momentum and an impressive climax.

In the end due to its long dull parts and the real excitement being rare, I’d say gritty drama lovers might like it — especially the kind of people who like political TV shows — but personally, as someone who prefers smooth vibes and plenty of rich action, I have to rate this particular movie Below Average although you may feel it deserves a slightly better rating to the success of the original Bourne movie which complements this one since this is a smooth continuation. As a standalone movie though, I think it warrants a rating of just Below Average although the odd piece of it is very good.

The action scene near the end is particularly long and hollow – lots of action, but all virtue-signally — it’s messy and momentumless and goes on far too long without significant change of pace or spirit.

The Bourne Identity (2002) – Matt Damon and Franka Potente

This is not a bad movie, it’s consistently entertaining, but the highs are never very high, so I can’t rate it any higher than slightly Above Average considering the many movies reviewed thus far and how they’ve been rated, including many classics rated Bang Average and just Above Average already.

If you enjoyed this movie and wish to see more, you’re in luck, since Bourne Identity is only the first of a 5-movie saga, including a trilogy starring Matt Damon (The Bourne Identity 2002; The Bourne Supremacy 2004; The Bourne Ultimatum 2007), then he skips the fourth (The Bourne Legacy 2012) since he felt the saga had run its course, but then he comes back for the fifth (Jason Bourne 2016). He looks very young in this first movie and is semi convincing in his role but still a bit green.

Franka Potente as the lead female kind of works — she has a Swiss vibe about her, perhaps with a touch of French. Her and The chemistry between her and Matt Damon kind of works and comes across on screen, but not in a big way.

Thunderbolts (2025) – Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Lewis Pullman and Sebastian Stan

This movie begins looking shockingly bad, as it follows a bunch of misfit would-be superheroes. But the story comes together eventually, and it actually becomes quite interesting, although there still continue to be extended patches of weird boring irritating dialogue.

It’s slightly off-genre in the direction of a parody, and anyone particularly fond of that genre will probably rate this movie much higher than I did; but for its balance of pros and cons, as an action hero movie, I rate this movie Below Average and am in no hurry to rewatch it, and that’s an understatement.

Until Death (2007) – Jean-Claude Van Damme and Selina Giles

Van Damme looks tired in this movie, and looks a bit weird with them sideburns. But at the same time, his job is probably easier since he’s playing a cop who can get away with whatever he wants – until he gets framed.

The lump on Van Damme’s forehead is also looking particularly bloated in this movie. The mood is pretty sour too. Like Van Damme doesn’t really want to be there, and maybe half of the crew don’t either. But they kind of made this tiredness match the moody genre — a poor excuse for an action movie, with unnecessary flashes of sleaze and even Van Damme heating up his own opioids on a spoon. By the end of the first hour, I have to rate it a couple levels below average, making it about So-So. It’s certainly not unwatchable though, providing you haven’t seen it in years and don’t very well remember how it goes and are sufficiently bored.

The movie has a major permanent change of mood around half way in — towards the end of the second hour — after Van Damme’s character was shot, barely survived, and slowly starts waking up from a coma. Here his wife, who was about to divorce him, spends quality time with him and they become a close couple again – free from the plague of his former vices, since he’s lost his memory and essentially started his life again — but his memories slowly return.

It gets particularly unpleasant about 20 minutes before the end, when the murderous crooks walk in on Van Damme’s pregnant wife while he’s away. The ending from that point on, is highly skippable if you’ve seen it before — the wife gets kidnapped and it’s just a boring standoff and shootout until the end, a bit like the boring long shootout ending of the otherwise top Van Damme movie Hard Target minus a few stunts. Massive missed opportunity with the interesting plot that unravelled around the middle of this movie since it arrived too late and rolled out too slow from there on until the long boring ending came about.

Selina Giles plays the lead female about adequately, and the actor playing chief of police does a good job too. Van Damme isn’t up to his usual standard — partly due to the poor script and partly probably because he’s having trouble with his personal life at the time.