The Bourne Legacy
Rating:
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Albert
Finney
Director: Tony Gilroy
Jeremy Renner is now the Bourne again spy in this action thriller, which has been stripped of its original team but tries to revamp the Bourne series.
Renner stars as Aaron Cross, an agent being trained in black ops program, Operation Outcome. the training's brutal; abandoned in the wild, Cross is taking blue pills to increase his mental skills and green ones which enhance his physical skill sets.
However, when the events of the Bourne Ultimatum come to fruition with Jason Bourne exposing the details of Operation Blackbriar and Treadstone Project, the CIA decides to close all their ops down and eliminate their assets thanks to the involvement of Edward Norton's clandestine agent Eric Byer.
But Cross discovers he's been double-crossed and escapes...
Firstly, this parallel-a-quel really does suffer from a murky and confusing script and not exactly heaps of tautly put together action sequences which proliferated the first three films, excellently put together by Paul Greengrass. There are chunks of heavy exposition from plenty of scenes of CIA suits standing around monitors and barking orders - which don't serve to add to the tension or suspense, merely to slow it down.
Secondly, it's incredibly hard to warm to Jeremy Renner's character, regardless of how well he acts throughout the film's rather dour, slightly stuffy and overlong running time.
Don't get me wrong, Renner is nothing less than electric as he launches a career as an action man of the movies; but it's symptomatic of the film that you don't really warm to Cross in a way you did with Bourne. It could potentially be something to do with what's at stake for each - with Bourne, it was about finding out who he was (a very personal motivation) whereas with Cross, it appears to be that he just wants to get his fix of his blue pills.
There's not enough action throughout The Bourne Legacy - and while there are some impressive sequences when they do show up, they're never as immediate or gripping as what's gone on in previous films. In some ways, Gilroy's made a parallel franchise which is solid, but unfortunately unspectacular. It may seem a little unfair to tar this film with the previous trilogy so much, but given Jason Bourne casts such a pall over the film, it seems unfortunately inevitable.
Interesting it may be and a solid thriller it is, but it's just not quite enough excitement to sustain and enthral you for 2 and a quarter hours of your life.