Fans of the Bourne franchise are excited that the new movie starring Matt Damon is very nearly here. They're all looking forward to him bringing back everything that made the character great. Although, if you're looking forward to hearing Damon perform great lines of dialogue, you'll be disappointed. Considering that the movie is called Jason Bourne, it turns out Jason Bourne doesn't say a whole heck of a lot. He apparently only has 25 lines in the entire film.
The focus of all of the Jason Bourne movies has always been the action set pieces. They're so important that it's possible they distracted you from the fact that Bourne doesn't actually talk very much in most of the movies. While 25 lines seems remarkably low, even for Jason Bourne, Matt Damon tells The Guardian that he loves his silent protagonist. The lack of dialogue is important as it shows the degree to which Jason Bourne feels alone. The actor said to the newspaper,
I've done it three times. In the first movie, the Marie Kreutz character [Bourne's girlfriend, played by Franka Potente] is still alive, so Bourne has a sounding board and he's more confused about who he is and a lot more chatty. Once she dies in the first act of the second movie, it's really a very lonely character. And we talked about that mostly on the second one. I remember Tony writing me an email saying, 'You do realize what this means? You do realize you're not going to talk in this movie.' I said, 'No, I love that.'
It probably takes a certain amount of pressure off when you're learning intricate fight choreography that you don't have very many lines to remember. You can probably just glance at the script before each scene, as each one probably didn't have more than an average of one line for Jason Bourne. And if he forgot his line, he could have just punched somebody, and that probably would have been fine.
All the same, 25 lines is almost nothing (Jason Bourne is 123 minutes long, meaning we're only talking about a line every five minutes on average). We thought it was odd when we realized that Superman only had 43 lines of dialogue in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but this makes the Man of Steel look downright loquacious. However, in that case, Superman had a second lead, Ben Affleck's Batman, to lean on. When your movie is called Jason Bourne there really isn't anyplace else to go. Certainly, the movie has other great actors like Julia Stiles and Tommy Lee Jones, but they're meant to be supporting players. It sounds like Jason Bourne is going to be a lot of wordless fist fights. We're okay with this.
Regardless of how talky Jason Bourne is, we're still looking forward to the new film. The entire franchise has been rock solid and we're certainly hoping that the new film follows suit. Jason Bourne hits theaters July 29th.
