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by Guest
Fri May 20, 2016 9:40 pm
Forum: Full Reviews
Topic: The Bourne Legacy (2012)
Replies: 2
Views: 1257

The Bourne Legacy (2012)

After The Bourne Ultimatum capped off the critically acclaimed action trilogy, hungry studio executives sought to fatten their wallets with a spinoff/sequel without star Matt Damon's involvement. Instead, Jeremy Renner stepped in to lead the picture, while Tony Gilroy (writer of all four Bourne films to date, and this summer's fifth installment) moved into the director's chair. This project came to be The Bourne Legacy, released five years after Ultimatum. Unfortunately, the resulting film is one that contains the plot/story rehash material that plagued Supremacy and Ultimatum, while simultaneously discarding the entertaining action that highlighted the sequels.

Set shortly after Ultimatum, The Bourne Legacy sees Outcome operative, Aaron Cross, on the run from the CIA. Colonel Eric Bryer is working to track him down from behind the scenes. But with Cross running low on the "chems" needed to sustain himself, he must find Dr. Marta Shearing to resupply before it's too late.

The familiarity of the story is indeed a significant problem. The only Bourne trope the film is missing is a phone call from the protagonist to the CIA for an impromptu meeting. Increasingly troubling is the total incoherency of the film. For the first hour, the film is very difficult to follow as it juggles multiple timelines, cross-edited scenes, and random flashbacks that are hard to discern from present-time footage. And with the story so tired and the characters so boring, it becomes to difficult to motivate oneself to make an effort to follow along.

A couple sequences work pretty well. The highlight of the film is a terrifying shooting inside a lab. This scene is more visceral and intense in ways the rest of the film never approaches. Another scene involving a shootout inside Dr. Shearing's house is a nice reminder of similarly-handled action in the previous films. Unfortunately, the action here is largely unmemorable and more numbing than riveting.

A few actors return from Supremacy and Ultimatum for a scene or two, such as Joan Allen, David Strathairn, and Albert Finney, but the film is largely occupied with new cast members. Jeremy Renner gives a reasonably good lead performance, though the thinness of his character prevents him from engaging as much as Damon did at his peak. Rachel Weisz gets a little more to work with, though some may find her to be excessively panicky. Edward Norton gets a lot out of a flimsy antagonist, and is one of three former or current Marvel actors in the film (Renner as Hawkeye, Norton as Hulk, and Corey Stoll as Yellowjacket). Oscar Isaac pops up for a few scenes as well, but like the rest of his cast, struggles to work above the mediocre script.

Despite mixed reviews and the lowest box-office returns of the franchise to date, The Bourne Legacy had a planned sequel with Renner before getting put on hold in favor of seeing Damon return to the role. This is regrettable, not because Legacy is good enough to warrant a second chapter, but because it ends abruptly without resolution, clearly intending for a sequel to fill in the gaps. The previous Bourne films were all made without the intention of producing a follow-up, so a proper sense of closure resided in each. And while this made subsequent films seem somewhat redundant, Legacy suffers from an opposite and even more severe problem; it is an incomplete film. It's excessively long runtime (135 minutes) is trying, but the fact that the film never reaches a proper conclusion makes the experience frustrating. The Bourne Legacy isn't completely terrible, but it is completely pointless.

Score: 4/10