10 / 10
9 / 10
9 / 10
8 / 10
7 / 10
The Bourne series is another of those rare franchises where I like every film, including the one with Jeremy Renner. The first film is a 10. The next two are 9s. The Renner film gets an 8 even though its plot is a little thin, and the most recent one, Jason Bourne, gets a 7.
They’re built on Robert Ludlum’s novels, but the films kept the name and the amnesia and threw out most of the rest. Doug Liman directed the first. Paul Greengrass directed the second, third and fifth. Tony Gilroy, who wrote the first three, directed the fourth. Together they rewrote the rules for Hollywood action. After Bourne, fights got shorter and harder, car chases got grittier, and even James Bond started throwing punches like Jason Bourne.
The Bourne Identity (2002): 10/10
A fishing boat pulls a man out of the Mediterranean with two bullets in his back and no memory. A tiny projector sewn into his hip gives him the number of a Zurich bank account. In the safe deposit box he finds cash, a gun and a stack of passports with his face on every one.
He’s Jason Bourne, or at least that’s one of his names, and somebody at the CIA wants him dead.
He hires Marie, a drifter played by Franka Potente, to drive him to Paris, and the two of them run while he figures out who he’s from what his body can do. He can spot every exit in a room. He can fight before he thinks. He doesn’t like what that says about him.
Doug Liman made it for about $60 million, and it made about $214 million. It’s a 10 because it’s lean, smart and surprising, and because Matt Damon, then best known for Good Will Hunting, turned out to be a completely convincing killer who’d rather not be one.
Damon, Potente and the Men from Treadstone
Damon underplays Bourne, as a frightened, competent man who keeps discovering he’s capable of terrible things, and Damon lets you see the discomfort under the skill.
Franka Potente gives the film its warmth. Marie is prickly and funny and completely out of her depth, and the relationship between the two of them is the reason you care whether Bourne survives. Chris Cooper plays Conklin, the man running the Treadstone program, as a sweating bureaucrat whose asset has gone off the leash, and Clive Owen makes a short, memorable turn as another Treadstone killer.
The Paris sequences are the film’s high point: a brutal apartment fight done almost entirely with a pen, and a chase through the streets in a battered red Mini Cooper that remains among the best car chases of its decade. The pen fight is the scene I’d keep if I could save only one from the whole series. A ballpoint in Damon’s hand is scarier than any gun in the film, and the Mini chase right after it is so much fun that I grin all the way through it.
For Writers
In The Bourne Identity, you learn who Jason Bourne is through what his body does before his mind catches up: the exits he counts, the moves he makes without deciding to. Skill revealed through action beats skill described in narration. When you write a character with a special talent, let the reader see it happen before anyone explains it. Take the most impressive thing your character can do and write the first scene where they do it without a single line naming the skill. Let the other characters’ reactions tell the reader what they just saw. Their surprise, fear or awe does more work than any description of the skill ever could.
The Bourne Supremacy (2004): 9/10
Paul Greengrass took over and brought the handheld camera and hard, fast editing he’d used on the documentary-style drama Bloody Sunday. The film feels like you’re standing too close to it, and it’s meant to.
Bourne and Marie are hiding in India when an assassin comes for them, and Marie dies in the chase. Bourne goes after the people responsible, and Joan Allen arrives as Pamela Landy, a CIA officer who begins by hunting him and ends up half on his side. Karl Urban plays Kirill, the Russian killer who shot Marie.
The Moscow car chase at the end is the film’s crowning sequence, a battered taxi against a Mercedes through city traffic, with real crashes and real damage. The quiet scene that follows, when Bourne apologizes to the daughter of a couple he killed, is the best thing in the series. It’s a 9 because it gives the franchise its conscience.
That apology is what separates Bourne from every other action hero I can name. Damon plays it with no speech and no excuses, and it moves me more than any chase in the franchise.
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007): 9/10
Greengrass came back and pulled everything together. Bourne finally tracks down the program that made him, and the film cleverly folds back into the end of Supremacy, so scenes you’ve already seen take on new meaning.
The Waterloo Station sequence, with Bourne guiding a journalist through a crowd while CIA watchers close in, is a lesson in suspense. The rooftop chase in Tangier ends in a brutally violent hand-to-hand fight. David Strathairn joins as Noah Vosen, the man running the program now called Blackbriar, and Albert Finney appears as the doctor who turned David Webb into Jason Bourne.
It won three Academy Awards, for film editing, sound editing and sound mixing, and made about $444 million worldwide. It gets a 9 from me because the first film’s surprises can’t be repeated, but as a finale to a trilogy it’s close to perfect, right down to the last shot in the East River.
For Writers
With The Bourne Ultimatum, the series circles back to a scene from the previous film and shows you what was happening around it. A familiar moment seen from a new angle can become the most powerful beat in a story. When you write a sequel or a long book, look for an earlier scene you can revisit with information the reader didn’t have the first time. Choose one scene from your first act and list what the reader doesn’t know yet. Then plan a later chapter that replays it with that knowledge, so the reader’s understanding changes in a single stroke. Done well, it’ll make the reader want to go back and read the first scene again.
The Bourne Legacy (2012): 8/10
Matt Damon sat this one out, and Tony Gilroy expanded the world instead. Jeremy Renner plays Aaron Cross, an agent from a parallel program called Outcome. Its operatives take pills that boost their bodies and minds. When the Bourne mess in Ultimatum threatens to expose everything, the agency decides to shut Outcome down by killing its agents.
I like this one a lot, though the plot is a little thin. Most of the story is Cross trying to get his hands on more pills, with Rachel Weisz as Dr. Marta Shearing, a scientist marked for death because she knows too much. Edward Norton plays Eric Byer, the official burning the program to the ground, with cold efficiency.
Renner is excellent: tougher and more openly desperate than Bourne, and physically superb. The Alaska opening and the Manila motorcycle chase are terrific. It’s an 8 because the action and the performances carry a story that needed one more turn.
Jason Bourne (2016): 7/10
Greengrass and Damon came back together nine years after Ultimatum. Bourne is living off the grid and fighting bare-knuckle matches for cash when Nicky Parsons, played again by Julia Stiles, brings him new information about his father’s role in Treadstone.
Tommy Lee Jones plays the CIA director, Alicia Vikander plays a young cyber officer with her own ambitions, and Vincent Cassel plays the assassin sent to stop Bourne. The motorcycle chase through a riot in Athens is superb, and the Las Vegas finale sends an armored SWAT truck smashing through half the Strip.
It’s a 7 because it’s a good Bourne movie that covers ground the first three already walked.
The father subplot leaves me cold. I never cared about Bourne’s dad the way I cared about Bourne figuring out who he was. Damon is still great in the part, though, the action is still the best in the business, and that Athens chase alone makes it worth a watch.
For Writers
Jason Bourne brings back the hero, the director and the style, and still feels smaller than the films it follows, because Bourne’s central question was answered two films earlier. A sequel needs a question the hero hasn’t already answered. When you write a continuation, find the new thing your protagonist doesn’t know, and make it as personal as the first book’s mystery. Write down the question your hero spends the last book answering, then write the new one. If they sound alike, keep digging until you find a question that scares your character. A sequel that asks the same question twice gives readers an answer they already have.
The Greengrass Style and What It Changed
The shaky camera and fast cutting that Greengrass brought to the series became the look of action films for a decade. When he did it, every cut had a purpose, and you always knew where you were. Many of the films that copied him never learned that part. The fights changed too. The series used a stripped-down, practical style drawn from real martial arts, and every fight ends fast and ugly. After Casino Royale in 2006, even Bond was fighting the Bourne way. John Powell’s driving scores and Moby’s “Extreme Ways” over every end credits gave the series a sound as recognizable as its look. Few franchises have influenced the rest of Hollywood this much.
Craft Note
Craft Note
What makes the Bourne films work is that the action always answers a question about the hero. Every fight shows us what Bourne was trained to be, and every escape shows us what he’s trying to become. When you write action, give every fight or chase a job in the character’s story. If you could cut it without learning anything new about your hero, it doesn’t belong.
Is the Bourne series as good as people say?
Yes. The Bourne Identity is a 10, Supremacy and Ultimatum are 9s, and together they rank among the best action trilogies ever made. The Bourne Legacy, an 8, is a strong side story with a thin plot and a terrific Jeremy Renner, and Jason Bourne, a 7, is a solid return even if it doesn’t match the original run.
Watch the first three in order, then take the other two as a bonus. Identity gets the 10 because it arrived lean and smart and felt like nothing else in the genre, and a sequel can’t surprise anyone the way a first film does.
That’s the whole gap between the 10 and the 9s. I like every one of them, and I’d happily watch all five back to back.
