Triple Threat: The Bourne Trilogy Was the Last Gasp of the Dad Action Movie
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.
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