Nobody in their right mind is going to deny that The Bourne Identity, Supremacy, and Ultimatum combine to form one of the greatest trilogies of the modern era, if not all-time. However, the debate over where the Jason Bourne franchise as a whole stands in history is an entirely different matter altogether.
Of course, given that bone-crunching spy saga raked in billions at the box office and won rave reviews across its first three chapters, Universal were always going to try and squeeze a little more money out of such a lucrative cash cow. As a result, we ended up with Jeremy Renner’s The Bourne Legacy, the reunion of Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass for another adventure, and TV series Treadstone, all of which were miles behind the opening trio in terms of quality.
In fact, Damon’s fourth outing as the amnesiac agent scored the worst reviews of out of all five feature films, while Legacy ended up as the second lowest-grossing out of the quintet behind Identity, and Treadstone was canned after a solitary season. With that in mind, it’s not a shock to see that virtually every single response to the question being posed in a recent Reddit thread is a variation on the word “no”.
It’s hard to say whether or not we’ve truly seen the last of Jason Bourne, but let’s hope that we have. Too many legacy sequels transparently exist for the sole purpose of making a quick buck, and we’ve already seen that with the fourth installment in the main story, so let’s just leave it alone and focus on brighter, shinier, newer things instead.