The Bourne Legacy (2012) Universal /Action-Adventure RT: 135 minutes Rated PG-13 (language, intense scenes of action and violence, mature themes) Director: Tony Gilroy Screenplay: Tony Gilroy and Dan Gilroy Music: James Newton Howard Cinematography: Robert Elswit Release date: August 10, 2010 (US) Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert Finney, Scott Glenn, Oscar Isaac, Donna Murphy, Stacy Keach, Dennis Boutsikaris, Zeljko Ivanek, Corey Stoll, Elizabeth Marvel. Box Office: $113.2M (US)/$276.1M (World)
Rating: **
I was really looking forward to The Bourne Legacy, especially after three solid action flicks starring Matt Damon as the titular amnesiac CIA assassin looking to solve the mystery of his own identity. However, this new installment isn’t really a sequel; it’s more of a spin-off as it features an entirely different protagonist who doesn’t possess the same memory issues as his predecessor. Jason Bourne is mentioned a number of times, but he’s not physically present for any of it. Just thought I’d make that clear to avoid any misunderstanding.
Let me stop right here and tell you that The Bourne Legacy doesn’t make too much sense. It’s actually the weakest entry in the series and most of the fault lies with the lead actor. Simply put, Jeremy Renner (The Town) doesn’t have the same screen presence as his predecessor. I don’t think anybody could have ever guessed that Matt Damon would make a convincing action star, yet he surprised everybody by tapping into his inner bad ass and delivering solid performances in all three Bourne movies. I really missed Damon in this outing even though Renner gives it the old college try. He’s just not ready for something like this.
However, he’s not the movie’s only problem. I also have issues with the pacing and the comparatively lackluster action scenes. The Bourne Legacy moves slowly, especially in the beginning. Its action sequences don’t have the same “WOW!” factor as its predecessors. It’s certainly a bit of a letdown, but that doesn’t mean it’s an entirely terrible movie. It gets a little better in the second half.
The events in The Bourne Legacy take place around the same time as the action in The Bourne Ultimatum. This time around, the action centers around Aaron Cross, a secret agent from some program called Operation Outcome. Apparently, it’s connected to Operation Treadstone and involves a shady pharmaceutical company.
As the movie opens, CIA director Ezra Kramer (Glenn, The Silence of the Lambs) reports the embarrassing Jason Bourne situation to one of the top people (Keach, Up in Smoke) at the Sterisyn-Morlanta pharmaceutical company who then reports the situation to Eric Byer (Norton, The Incredible Hulk), a shady guy from another government agency who holds the “CIA clowns” responsible for the whole mess. His job is to clean it up. This entails eliminating everybody involved and I do mean everybody.
Killing the other agents from Outcome is easy. They’re unknowingly poisoned by way of their “chems”, the pills they take to maintain their physical and mental enhancements. Cross is in a remote area of Alaska on a training exercise so Byers sends a drone armed with a missile to deal with him. Naturally, he misses and Cross gets away. Needless to say, he is POed.
Cross isn’t the only loose end. There’s also Marta (Weisz, The Mummy 1 & 2), a virologist at the pharmaceutical company lab who survives a mass workplace shooting by one of her colleagues (Ivanek, The Sender). He sends four assassins to her home to finish her off, but Cross shows up in time to take them all down. He’s there to get more chems which he finds out have become obsolete. Now they’re using a virus to make the agents’ enhancements permanent. To obtain the virus, they have to go to a facility in Manila. It’s going to be tricky with Byer and his people after them.
I said earlier that The Bourne Legacy doesn’t make a lot of sense. It doesn’t. Director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), who wrote all three previous Bourne films, doesn’t seem to care if the audience can follow what’s going on. Not that any of it really matters anyway. It’s one part of a much bigger problem; namely, the movie is pointless. When it was all over, I couldn’t tell you what was accomplished by any of it. Rarely has a film spun its wheels as blatantly as The Bourne Legacy.
The acting is okay for the most part. It’s not great, but I’ve seen much worse. Norton doesn’t leave any kind of impression as the main bad guy, the one that sets everything in motion. Weisz shows some spunk as the doctor who didn’t sign on for anything like this. By way of keeping Legacy connected to the Bourne universe, a few actors from Ultimatum- Glenn, David Strathairn (L.A. Confidential), Joan Allen (The Ice Storm) and Albert Finney (Tom Jones)- make brief appearances. All it does is remind the audience of better times with a cooler protagonist. The weakest link, as I already said is Renner.
Gilroy doesn’t have the same knack for action sequences as his predecessors in the series, Doug Liman (Identity) and Paul Greengrass (Supremacy and Ultimatum). It doesn’t possess the same sense of urgency or intensity nor is it driven by the same level of paranoia. Instead, it’s as flat and generic as any straight-to-DVD espionage thriller. It does pick up a bit in the second half with a climactic chase on foot and motorcycle. That’s when it starts to almost feel like a Bourne movie. It’s reasonably exciting, but it hardly makes up for the two hours that precede it. The Bourne Legacy clocks in at 135 minutes which is longer than it needs to be.
After three amazing action movies, The Bourne Legacy comes as a crushing disappointment. It lacks the kinetic energy that defines the Bourne label. I wouldn’t say it’s boring exactly, but it didn’t hold my interest too much either. In the end, it’s just a big pile of nothing that goes nowhere.
