Matt Damon is returning to the role of Jason Bourne the recovered amnesiac/super-spy-ninja guy for another edition of the Bourne Franchise.
Why?
Because he tried to have a career outside of the Bourne franchise and failed.
Failed badly.
A quick look at his box office record shows that the last movie with him in a major role that was an unqualified hit was True Grit, and in that movie he was just Jeff Bridges' sidekick. At best a handful of his recent movies have broken even, but most have tanked, and tanked badly. Without Jason Bourne his career is dangerously close to getting into Nicole Kidman and George Clooney territory where he becomes a full fledged box-office negative.*
He needs a hit to keep the roles and the fat paycheques coming in, and while Universal made money with the Damon-less Bourne Legacy, figures they'll do better with the original titular character.
Personally, I never really got into the Bourne Movie Franchise. Some may knock the Bond movies for being repetitive, but Bourne is worse. Bourne is as if the James Bond writers didn't want to waste time coming up with ANYTHING new.
The premise of the franchise is that the CIA ignores terrorism, espionage, foreign threats, and international crime because they're too busy trying and failing to kill their own people.
Why are they trying to kill their own people?
Because the CIA did some evil illegal stuff trying to create some sort of super-spy-ninja-types that they will have to kill the moment they step outside because their existence threatens to expose the illegal stuff. Only the illegal stuff worked too well, and they're unstoppable.
Now the CIA could just leave the guy alone, because unless there's an army of assassins blowing up large chunks of Europe and the USA there's not enough proof to get this guy's story past the far fringe of a conspiracy theory website.
But they don't, because there wouldn't be a movie, so they do all kinds of mad homicidal stuff to give the hero the evidence he needs to blow the lid off of everything.
It's a premise that's not only stupid on every level, it's a lazy hackneyed cliche and really just an excuse to have lots of shaky-cam fight scenes, another thing that bugs me.
Anyway, we'll have to see if Damon's Bourne can breathe some life into his nearly terminal career.
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*Now some of you will say: "What about Gravity, that was a hit with George Clooney?" And while he was in that movie, the studio deliberately left him out of the ads for Gravity, emphasizing Sandra Bullock, who is actually a fully qualified movie star.
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