5. Jason Bourne - The Bourne Franchise
There's a boyish charm to Matt Damon's performance. Deadly, mixed with innocence, you genuinely want him to uncover the corruption at the heart of the US Government and there's a sense of thrill as he finally gets close to exposing Project Treadstone in
The Bourne Ultimatum.The trouble, is, while we're rooting for him throughout the trilogy, there's one simple fact that, like Jack Sparrow above, we conveniently forget because well...Jason Bourne has forgotten everything about his past too. He was a government assassin. If Jason Bourne had been a military officer; a sniper perhaps or member of a black ops unit, both trained to kill, it would be easy to dismiss his past actions. But an assassin is something different altogether. You wouldn't choose to be friends with an assassin. You certainly wouldn't will him on to succeed. Because for a start, there's illegal and then there's
illegal, and that's where Bourne's 'rogue' element comes into play. Because of his attempts to take on the people he worked for previously and because he's likable post-memory loss, the audience lets him get away with what he committed in his past. The death of his girlfriend Marie in
The Bourne Supremacy only makes the audience wills him on to embark on further revenge. By the end of the trilogy, he somehow manages to get away without any account of his own past actions as an assassin. Because whether the government agency is held accountable or not as the series progresses into
Bourne 5, Jason Bourne is still in the wind...