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A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe that’s why the trilogy is such a satisfying structure for so many epic series or curious corners of cinema history. This year in Triple Threat, Ken Lowe revisits another of cinema’s best trilogies each month, including some unofficial trilogies that have come to define a director, actor, or time in film history. You can follow the series here.
The Dad Action Movie is an intricate device, brutal in its simplicity at the same time it is ponderous in its complexity. There’s deep psychology behind almost every type of genre fiction, of course. But the best Dad Action Movies scratch an itch so particular that it’s impossible not to want to hold it up to a microscope (if you’re me, anyway). There must be a reason, for instance, that so many of these movies (The Fugitive, Air Force One, various Jack Ryan thrillers, and I would even argue Blade Runner to a degree) star Harrison Ford, whose Dad-ness has straddled the turn of the last century and continues to reign supreme on screens big and small. We must read something into these movies’ insistence on a hypercompetent lone wolf character, someone whose prudence and preparedness is ignored by the brass to their own downfall.
I am a dad now, though I married into it. Devil help me, I understand the exasperated patriarchy that is at the core of stuff like National Lampoon’s Vacation even if I fight like hell never to resemble it. Yet just as this season of my life began, it seems the Dad Action Movie has largely been put out to pasture.
I need to define what I mean, here. These are not movies that necessarily feature dads as protagonists (though it doesn’t hurt). These are movies aimed at your dad, assuming you’re an adult child and he’s somewhere in his 50s-70s. The Dad Action Movie is even more specific. I am not referring to the non-Bat filmography of Christopher Nolan: Dunkirk is a Dad War Movie, Oppenheimer a Dad Period Piece (ditto the post-Gladiator filmography of Ridley Scott, or anything with Russell Crowe). The action isn’t the draw in those, it’s the window dressing. Everything Clint Eastwood has directed since Unforgiven is resolutely a Dad Movie, but none really qualify as Dad Action Movies.
Taken is the current template for the Dad Action Movie, but that’s now 15 years old—Wrath of Man was a great recent example of these films that actually doesn’t star Liam Neeson, which are all the equivalent of cooking two boxes of powder-and-butter mac and cheese at once and then eating all of it over the course of a long weekend during which you do not intend to wear pants. And even Neeson is talking about how he’s 72 and can’t keep doing this. John Wick doesn’t seem like it qualifies due to lack of Dad-ness (he’s a character in Fortnite)—but maybe you disagree.
But right before Neeson took the Dad Action Movie down into the low-rent parts of studio financing, there was The Bourne Identity, the movie that bridged the age of post-Cold War spy action movies (that is, Dad Action Movies) and the age of post-9/11 spy action movies. Considering the degree to which The Bourne Identity is about how thuddingly stupid and arrogant the American security apparatus is (and how good it might feel to beat agents of said apparatus in the face while screaming at them that if they surveil you any more, you will kill them) it is amazing that it was in production well before the World Trade Center towers actually fell.
Although the War on Terror is the unavoidable subtext of these movies, it is nowhere in the text itself. It is safely a Dad Action Movie: All about the trials and tribulations of one guy who is simultaneously a multimillion-dollar killing machine and yet absolved of it, the only guy who has the inclination and the ability to take on the rotten system that made him the way he is and that now will not just leave him alone to have an eternal sexy vacation with Franka Potente. Matt Damon was already Dad Movie Heir Apparent by 2001, but this trilogy, which both begins and ends with Damon’s character (whose name is literally pronounced “born”) waking up anew in blood and water, heralded his ascension. On one side of it, you have Harrison Ford raging that he did not kill his wife, and on the other you have Liam Neeson calmly explaining that he has a particular set of skills.
It is truly the peak of Dad Action Cinema.
The Movies
As The Bourne Identity begins, Matt Damon is fished out of the sea near Europe—the rest of the time in this trilogy will, with very few exceptions, be on land in Europe. He remembers nothing, and his body is riddled with bullets and a little pellet with a message telling him how to access a Swiss bank account’s safety deposit box with enough money to have any kind of life he wants—and the various passports and other papers that will allow him to live those lives. The trouble is that he can’t remember who he is, how he can speak every continental language, or how he ended up shot and half-drowned to death. He only knows that (one of) his U.S. passports says his name is Jason Bourne.
We know, of course, that the answer will come looking for him before long. In this case, it’s agents of the CIA (or whoever), Conklin (Chris Cooper, gleefully playing the world’s worst boss) and Abbott (Brian Cox), two apparatchiks of the U.S. security state who have gotten high off the rush that comes with being given carte blanche by the government to just kill or disappear whoever you deem a terrorist. Conklin runs Treadstone, a top secret outfit that employs deep cover assassins all over the world. Ostensibly they are there to eliminate America’s enemies, but it seems like they function entirely to clean up Conklin and Abbott’s messes and settle their petty geopolitical grudges.
After evading capture at a U.S. Embassy in Zurich, Bourne bumbles into the life of an itinerant German woman, Marie (Potente, who I really wish we knew more about). Hilariously, Marie baffles the surveillance state because she hasn’t had her shit together in a decade—the only plausible explanation for why she would jump into a car with a guy like Bourne, even if said guy is offering a brick of cash and looks like 2001 Matt Damon.
As Bourne and Marie follow the trail of clues about his life, they are hunted by emotionless assassins and constantly ducking police. This is where Dad Action comes into play—and specifically, a motion-sickness-inducing flavor of it that sadly dominated action movies in the aughts. To call the editing and camera movement “frenetic” is an understatement.
Eventually, Bourne puts enough pieces together that he gets the drop on his pursuers (following a gritty and abrupt sniper-vs.-shotgun duel with Clive Owen). Bourne catches up with Conklin and demands answers. It turns out he is a malfunctioning weapon, an Evil Spy who has been a Bad Boy. Bourne grabs his shitty boss by the face and spanks him. Conklin is unceremoniously murdered by his own agency, his death buried in a line item by a straight-faced Cox. And for the moment, Bourne is free.
The Bourne Identity was exactly the right degree of cynical for its time, with its streak of angry individualism hidden inside an otherwise slick blockbuster. It didn’t conquer the world compared to other stuff that came out during the same time period (when Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man arrived on the scene and began the sidelining of the pure action movie in their own various ways). But it earned itself a no-nonsense trilogy.
Of the various sins Bourne committed in Identity, the worst by far was making enough money to warrant a follow-up movie, of course. So, to punish him, The Bourne Supremacy opens with his picture-perfect life with Marie hiding out in India being interrupted by a Russian assassin (Karl Urban, just before his ubiquity). Bourne survives, but Marie dies in the assassination attempt. Bourne immediately goes beast mode, intentionally provoking the U.S. security state to try to capture him and then, as before, out-thinking and out-maneuvering them in order to work his way up the food chain and get those who are trying to get him.
Supremacy is a meaner movie than Identity in its themes and particulars: We learn Bourne was manipulated by Conklin and Abbott to murder a Russian political idealist, not for any threat he posed to America, but because they were being paid off by a Russian oligarch. Potente dies in the first five minutes of the movie, and this is when she was an international indie darling. At one point, Cox coldly murders a subordinate just for asking the wrong questions. In Identity there was at least some pretense toward all this being to protect America. Supremacy reveals that no, there never was. The penultimate scene, in which Bourne confesses his very first crime to the daughter of those he unthinkingly slew, is a quiet coda about how all this secrecy and murder affects the real people who are defenselessly and unwittingly caught up in it.
The last scene, though, is Matt Damon pulling one of his favorite tricks, which is revealing that he has been watching the person he’s been speaking on the phone with the whole time. The ultimate spy power move.
It’s just also that this scene is taking place in the third movie! It’s a handy little trick that the series executes with exactly zero fanfare, as is its wont. In The Bourne Ultimatum, Damon picks up right where he left off, as does the Serious CIA Person who was trying to get to the bottom of the conspiracy surrounding his return in the last movie, Pamela Landy (Joan Allen). Landy is in a race with her superior at the CIA (David Strathairn), who is determined to kill Bourne without actually asking what his whole deal is. Suspecting that her whole outfit is dirty, Landy recruits the former Treadstone operative Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) for her innate knowledge of Bourne’s behavior.
Stiles, it must be said, is in all three of these movies in the truly thankless role of calmly telling the old white men how, if they do not stop trying to kill Jason Bourne, they will be killed by Jason Bourne, just like the last old white men she just explained this to in the last movie. There is one throwaway line about how she and Bourne were an item, but that’s not explored in this movie. The films seem to forget an earlier line by Conklin in the first one, about how he could send Nicky to go kill some deposed African dictator if he wanted just anybody to do it—she certainly does not exhibit a killer instinct. Stiles’ only emotions here are terror that she is about to be killed and disbelief that her superiors have this highly specific death wish.
After rooftop chases, scooter chases, brutal fistfights and shootouts, and embarrassing the CIA at every turn, Bourne finally comes face to face with the twisted scientist who molded him into a killing machine, portrayed by a creepy Albert Finney. As Landy blows the whole conspiracy wide open, Bourne is put in the same position as he once put Clive Owen’s doomed assassin.
“Look what they make you give,” he laments in the moment before he takes a plunge into the East River.
The most Dad Action Movie part of this trilogy, I think, is that it didn’t make a huge splash. This kind of actioner, where a competent government killing machine is the good guy, is no longer a tentpole movie, it’s a B-movie sideshow. As fun as the Bourne movies were, I don’t hear a lot of nostalgia for them, and attempts to resurrect the franchise in the next decade fell flat—I nearly fell asleep trying to watch The Bourne Legacy for research purposes, which made the eye-rolling decision to make the bad guys a pharmaceutical company. Evidently we all have internalized how hard the American people have surrendered to the surveillance state and just don’t want to think about it anymore.
For me, it ends where it began: In the water. A man used and discarded by a state who does not care about him, his contributions to the people of his country unsung and unrewarded. If only he could cast it all off. Rise from the water and the blood, anew. Re-Bourne.
Ope. That’s my cell phone alarm. Daughter’s got tennis practice.
Join us next month as Triple Threat concludes with a look at a new and ambitious horror trilogy: Mia Goth and Ti West’s X Trilogy of X, Pearl, and Maxxxine.
Kenneth Lowe would stand in line for this. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.
This post was originally published on here
