Jason Bourne: A Necessary American Hero on the Big Screen

To Be Bourne Again

A friend of mine happened to mention that Jason Bourne was more his type of secret agent than James Bond. This got me thinking as such things often do. Jason Bourne would make a very good American James Bond. He is currently out of work and lacks the skills that most civilian employment would require. I just doubt that Hollywood could handle the task.

I am not going to go into the Bourne films being anti-American. Hollywood does not like Americans and has its own gospel to preach. A business makes its money by serving its customers and Hollywood is willing to suffer losses to deliver its message. That is as far as this needs to go.

The latest Bourne movie works as an action movie. I do not see it getting very far because it does not deliver on what the audience really wants. Jason Bourne was a hero in the first two movies in the series. Even if he was fighting to save his own life, he was still an American hero fighting for us. We can identify with a man who is not suffering from psychoanalysis fighting to remove a few villains from the world.

In the first movie, Jason Bourne wakes up after having hesitated to kill a man who did not return the favor. Nobody makes excuses for the evil of the man that Bourne failed to kill. Even though Jason Bourne becomes the target throughout the movie, he remains the hero facing down evil. Bourne would have been a stronger character if he could have realized that the only thing that evil needs to win is for good men to sit back and allow evil to win. Trying to kill Bourne off just because he can be dangerous makes him sympathetic to the audience.

When Bourne returns, he is brought out of retirement to take the blame for an assassination that he had nothing to do with. That makes Bourne more sympathetic. He is fighting a defined evil that misused Treadstone for its own purposes. Jason Bourne is the most like James Bond in this movie because he is a super-hero facing down a super-villain. In fact, the general public was being ripped off by the crime that Bourne was framed to cover up for so Bourne is fighting for us in this film.