With James Bond on hiatus following the poor reception afforded to Pierece Brosnan’s swansong in Die Another Day, there was a gap in the market for anyone looking to become cinema’s most popular secret agent, a position that Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne was more than happy to seize for himself.
The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum combine to form one of the greatest trilogies of the modern era, with Doug Liman setting the stage in the opening installment before Paul Greengrass went on to inspire a decade of action cinema with his signature handheld camera techniques.
All three were greeted with widespread critical acclaim and bumper box office, so fans were naturally overjoyed when it was announced Greengrass and Damon would be reuniting for Jason Bourne almost a decade later. While the movie did manage to earn $415 million at the box office, it wasn’t a patch on its predecessors.
In fact, Jason Bourne comfortably scored the worst reviews in the franchise’s history, ending up with a lower Rotten Tomatoes score than even Jeremy Renner’s lukewarm The Bourne Legacy. It’s not a bad way to wrap up the saga all things considered, but it simply wasn’t up to the standards we’d come to expect. However, that hasn’t stopped it from experiencing a resurgence on Netflix, where it can currently be found as the fifth most-watched title on the platform, as per FlixPatrol.
