Awesome Music: The series has a very tense, recognizable, and charming score with the template set by John Powell
Most fans know the theme of the movies to be the single from Moby, "Extreme Ways". While not explicitly about Jason Bourne himself, the song has become iconic with the character, and has been present during the end credits all five films. It was redone starting with The Bourne Ultimatum.
The ever so tense chase theme with a different flavor for each film such as the audibly Morocco-set version of Ultimatum.
The Bourne Legacy may not exactly be a fan favorite, but admit it, you loved how they added an entire symphony for the song at the end.
Fitting the tradition, Jason Bourne also remixed the iconic single which comes across like it took an element from all previous renditions and combined it into one. The result is nothing short of badass.
Novels
Adaptation Displacement: A textbook example, as the movies have replaced the books in collective memory.
Badass Decay: Lustbader changes Bourne from an unstoppable juggernaut into a whining wimp who wouldn't win without outside help.
Creator's Pet: Lustbader's Arkadin in the books. Lustbader keeps filling the narration with Arkadin's past and making Bourne exhausted so Bourne cannot kill Arkadin. When someone writes Bourne novels and guarantees upfront that the villain is going to have his own trilogy, you know that villain is a pet.
Designated Hero: Arkadin, in the flashbacks of his past. The narration is meant to make readers sympathize with him, his tormented life in Nizhny Tagil, and his struggle against various Russian crime bosses. The problem is that, even considering all that, he is still a murderer, a terrorist, in a life of crime for selfish gains, and no better than the Russian gangsters he kills.
Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans of Ludlum's trilogy aren't fond of the novels written by Eric van Lustbader after Ludlum's death. To them, those novels apply Broad Strokes to Bourne's past that was established by Ludlum, portray Bourne with Badass Decay, and fail to sell Arkadin as a complex villain worthy of his own trilogy.
The movies as a franchise
And You Thought It Would Fail: Doug Liman constantly clashed with executives, who demanded a more high-octane action movie in the vein of Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer, which were all the rage at the Turn of the Millennium, and had a production that went beyond schedule. The film also reportedly posted the worst test screening responses in studio history, which was enough for Universal to virtually give up on the movie, even though Austin Powers a couple of years prior bucked the worst test screenings for New Line Cinema to become a Cash-Cow Franchise. Universal, thinking they needed to cut their losses, put the movie head-to-head with Scooby-Doo in hopes that it would be quietly buried in the face of what was expected to be a box office juggernaut. However, the film got advance positive word from critics, which fueled an overperforming box office and solid final tally in the heat of a crowded summer, and becoming a Genre Turning Point as Die Another Day wore out audiences on the over-the-top gadget-and-CG-filled wink-wink type of spy movie later that year. Universal, with renewed hope, gave next director Paul Greengrass a lot more freedom to work, resulting in a Cash-Cow Franchise of their own.
Identity & Supremacy: Ward Abbott is a corrupt CIA chief, serving as one of the architects of Operation Treadstone and the head of its day-to-day operations. Abbott oversaw the creation of Treadstone and the implementation of its many brutal training routines, involving torture and psychological rewiring of soldiers into killing machines. After Abbott stole millions of dollars of CIA money with the help of Yuri Gretkov, Abbott tested Treadstone's capabilities by assassinating politician Vladimir Neski and his wife to silence their outrage against Gretkov's corruption. With dozens of people—terrorist, political dissident, and American citizen alike—murdered by Treadstone's operatives on Abbott's watch, Abbott later murders his subordinate Alexander Conklin to pin everything on him and rebrand Treadstone as "Blackbriar" to continue its operations. Later using Gretkov to kill off multiple CIA operatives and frame Jason Bourne for their deaths, Abbott tries to assassinate Bourne to cover his tracks—getting Bourne's lover Marie murdered in the process—and when he is nearing exposure, Abbott stabs his own assistant to death for unintentionally deducing Abbott's criminal activities. Even when he is Driven to Suicide by exposure, Abbott reiterates that he feels no remorse for anything he has done, proclaiming himself a patriot to his last breath.
CIA Director Robert Dewey, the Big Bad of the film and the Greater-Scope Villain of the series, seeks to gain total control over the private lives of the American public. In the past, Dewey was one of the top minds behind Operation Treadstone, which used torture and brainwashing to turn U.S. servicemen into dangerous assassins. When Treadstone founder and Jason Bourne's father Richard Webb found out that Dewey had his sights set on his son, he tried to shut down the program and go public about it, only for Dewey to order his assassination in a False Flag Operation before manipulating Jason into enlisting. Going on to oversee other shady government projects, Dewey spearheads an operation known as Iron Hand, which uses a backdoor in the highly popular social network platform Deep Dream to violate the privacy of millions of American citizens, and has Jason's friend Nicky Parsons assassinated when she tries to leak info about it to the public. When Jason takes up Nicky's cause, Dewey hunts him, showing his ruthlessness by having his own agents callously killed and threatening the safety of a former CIA employee's family should the man reveal anything to Bourne during a violent interrogation. During the film's climax, Dewey tries to use another false flag terrorist operation to kill both CIA employee Heather Lee and his own co-conspirator Aaron Kalloor for undermining his authority.
The Asset, Dewey's chief henchman, is first seen during the chase scene in Athens, where he murders several bystanders just to set up a sniper nest with which to ambush Bourne and Nicky. The Asset later derails Heather Lee's attempt to make contact with Bourne by murdering his fellow CIA operatives sent to monitor the meeting, callously disregarding the fact that they are his comrades and that they have nothing to do with his beef with Bourne. Finally, after failing in his attempt to assassinate Kalloor and Lee in Vegas, the Asset murders a LVMP SWAT officer, hijacks his SWAT truck, and charges it straight into a traffic full of civilian cars just to put a few yards of distance from Bourne. In the climactic fight with Bourne, the Asset denounces Bourne as "a traitor, always has been a traitor," even though he's the one who railroaded Bourne into the CIA by using a car bomb to kill Bourne's father, a loyal CIA employee, and attributing it to a terrorist organization.
The first two sequels kept getting more acclaim from critics, with the third film The Bourne Ultimatum generally being seen as the best.
Inverted with the later films. Though not technically a sequel, Legacy didn't receive the same amount of praise that the first three Damon films did, and despite bringing Damon back, neither has Jason Bourne.
Genre Turning Point: The Bourne Identity was seen as a welcome, "adult" relief from action and spy movies in the vein of Stuff Blowing Up Bay/Bruckheimer movies, where even the Jack Ryan movie that year (The Sum of All Fears, ironically starring Damon's best friend Ben Affleck) had its share of nuclear-explosion CG pyrotechnics. With maligned movies xXx and Die Another Day driving a stake in the gadgets-and-girls over-the-top spy fiction for the time, movies began to crib from the playbook of Bourne, emphasizing government ops as villains as opposed to scene-chewing megalomaniacs hell-bent on world destruction; a steely-eyed human hero over swaggering, quippy protagonists; avoiding the Eiffel Tower Effect in globe-trotting; and going with brutal close-quarters combat and realistic gunplay over gadgets. No movie embodied the results of the Bourne turning point than Casino Royale (2006), a James Bond molded in the image of the two Bourne movies released before it, marrying sensibilities of that series to the Bond formula to great, reinventing success critically and commercially.
Iron Woobie: Let's just say Bourne had a lot to go through.
Magnificent Bastard: Jason Bourne himself is an unstoppable, exceptionally dangerous man who has made his mark as one of film's most badass super spies. Born "David Webb", he was the first volunteer for the Treadstone program, taking the name Jason Bourne and becoming the CIA's most efficient operative. Upon losing his memory when his morals cost him a mission, Bourne becomes a rogue agent in his attempt to find the truth about his past, skillfully evading all forms of law enforcement and government interference as he traverses the globe. Bourne is a master of cat-and-mouse, capable of dodging dozens of cameras and enemy eyes with little hassle, and he is just as proficient in giving or avoiding chase, as he demonstrates incredible evasive maneuvers multiple times both on foot and on wheels. Proficient in hand-to-hand combat, Bourne regularly brutalizes multiple policemen at a time, and with his ability to turn almost anything into a weapon, he consistently outperforms his fellow Treadstone assassins both tactically and physically. In his quest for the truth, Bourne humiliates and dismantles his CIA pursuers on the regular, even turning some of them into his allies, and though he loses several loved ones like Marie or Nicky, he always avenges them tenfold. By the time Bourne is done with those working against him, multiple black ops divisions have been exposed to the public; the men behind Treadstone and who killed Bourne's father are dead; and Bourne has vanished without a trace once more, never to be found until he chooses.
Narm: The series trope of the CIA re-running black ops under a different name and not much else in each movie, almost to parodic levels by the end:
Roger Ebert: That'll cover their tracks. It's like if you wanted to conceal a Ford plant, you'd call it Maytag.
Once Original, Now Common: While the series has been rightfully credited with refreshing the Spy Fiction genre on film in the 2000s, it got followed by so many copycats, it eventually made everyone tired of the trends started by Bourne. Eventually, there's been a new surge in the demand for more escapist "fun" in the genre since the early 2010s and its strict formula and aversion to Tuxedo and Martini-like tropes (which James Bond had re-embraced with Skyfall, ditto the Mission: Impossible Film Series with Ghost Protocol) are part of the reasons why Jason Bourne didn't feel as fresh as the trilogy once did.
Only the Creator Does It Right: One may argue that the Bourne series has two daddies with Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass. With The Bourne Identity, Liman gave the film a unique style, but it was Greengrass who would flesh it out in its sequels The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, with Liman still involved as executive producer, garnering even greater acclaim. But when Greengrass turned down the offer to direct The Bourne Legacy, Matt Damon left with him, saying he wouldn't do any more movies without him, and Liman left too. This is part of why Legacy wasn't as well-received as its predecessors. It should be noted that Tony Gilroy wrote all four films (and directed Legacy). The fact that he wasn't involved with Jason Bourne even though Greengrass and Damon returned probably led to it also not being as well-received as the original trilogy.
A notable aversion that is somewhere between this and Even Better Sequel. Each one of the first three films is considered to be quite good and at the least on par with each other. Although there are a group of people who consider the third film the best due to having the highest Just for Fun/HSQ.
Though some considered Supremacy to be a bit of a step down, with more of an action emphasis and an overload of Jitter Cam (thankfully toned down in Ultimatum).
Legacy is a bit more divisive in this respect, with its very existence of trying to make the series a franchise and reverting what should have wrapped up the series in Ultimatum. That said, the movie was much better received than comparable attempts due to having a few shared members of the production (the same writer, who also takes on director duties) and a great cast with Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz and Edward Norton.
Jason Bourne (the fifth movie) however seems to have fallen into that territory, mainly because of criticism regarding the lack of innovation storywise.
Song Association: Moby's "Extreme Ways", due to it being used as the credit's song for each movie. The first trailer for Jason Bourne only needed the song's first two notesnote A violin triad held for a whole note, admittedly pretty iconic to signify that the movie it was advertising was a Bourne movie.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: One of the problems with Legacy and Jason Bourne is that they undo the hard-won victory at the conclusion of Ultimatum, showing that the bad guys managed to prevent the incriminating documents from being made public and covered their tracks further by slandering and murdering even more people than they already had. In a world as drab, bleak and depressing as the Bourne movies already are, many fans simply choose to pretend that the latter two movies simply never happened in order to enjoy some ray of sunshine.
with a different flavor for each film such as the audibly Morocco-set version