First off, the core three films — The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum — hold up pretty well in all regards, save for technology. But as a capsule of the time in which they were released, solid! 

The fourth film, set about a decade after the original trilogy wrapped, wasn’t so great even upon just my first viewing. Do you remember how bad the final two Die Hard films were compared to the originals? Yeah, basically the same thing going here. I had decent hopes for it, too, since it costarred Alicia Vikander and Tommy Lee Jones.

I was shocked at how short the films were. None of the three was longer than 1:59 (Jason Bourne was about 2:10) and, when you lob off 10 minutes for credits, that’s about 1:49, give or take. In an age when movies easily eclipse the two-hour mark a vast majority of the time and even close in on the dreaded three-hour mark more often than not, the fact that these stories were contained under two hours each is kinda refreshing. Even kids animated films are creeping steadily closer to the two-hour mark.

Enough about that. Overall, I was happy to find I liked the films enough that we’ll get some more mileage out of our old DVDs. 

Is it strange that I expected them to not be as much fun nearly two decades after the first one originally premiered?