Butterfly sells itself as a slick spy thriller, but what it delivers is a B-movie dressed up in Prime Video gloss. The central flaw? We're told David is an elite agent, yet he has no go-bag, no secured safe houses, not even something as simple as a forged passport. Tradecraft is nonexistent-he feels less like an operative and more like a suburban dad caught in cosplay.
The action sequences are equally hollow. Where Bourne uses pens, magazines, and taxis with gritty improvisation, Butterfly gives us generic car chases, knife fights with too many flourishes, and Rebecca's constant smirks that drain every ounce of tension. It's all style, no substance-action scenes that look choreographed rather than lived in.
Psychologically, the show fumbles again. Jason Bourne was haunted, layered, believable. David and Rebecca? One is inconsistent paranoia, the other a "smirking teen assassin" stereotype. The emotional beats play more like daytime soap melodrama with pistols than a gripping espionage story.
World-building is paper thin. There's no convincing spy infrastructure, no sense of a global intelligence machine. Just pretty backdrops, some melodrama, and occasional gunfire. Instead of espionage with stakes, we get "family therapy sessions with prop weapons."
If Jason Bourne is an apex predator of spy thrillers, Butterfly is Jason in Psycho with a potato gun and a sulking sidekick. A waste of film-yawn-worthy action, ill-prepared agents, and a smirk so overused it should have its own credit in the cast list.
