The Bourne Legacy

Up-and-comer Jeremy Renner takes up the mantle vacated by Matt Damon, who played Jason Bourne through a trilogy of hugely successful films, all based on the pulp novel series by Robert Ludlum.  Damon went out on a high note, as the final two films, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, both directed by Paul Greengrass, were top-shelf espionage films, raising the bar for what action films could accomplish.  With Greengrass no longer attached to the series, Damon felt that there was nowhere left for the Bourne character to go, a truly sentient, and all too uncommon admittance from a Hollywood star whose presence helped the third film easily clear 200 million at the box office.  Unfortunately Tinseltown does not have such scruples, and a fourth Bourne film was soon in production.

Don’t worry about refreshing on the first three stories in order to appreciate The Bourne Legacy, even though Treadstone, the top secret project to create super-spies, and many of the previous characters' names are bandied around quite a bit by the government officials in their quiet, hushed rooms; this story is meant to be self-contained.  Renner plays Aaron Cross, another Treadstone agent like Bourne, who finds himself on the run when the clandestine agency behind his transformation into super-agent feels threatened by exposure and decides to close up shop, and eliminate all the agents.  One by one they are all killed off within the first ten minutes, except for Jason Bourne of course – gotta leave that loose end open just in case, and yet for some reason the audience is supposed to care about Cross, who also survives, apparently because of his backstory, which reveals the reasons why being a super-agent is so important to him.  Together with one of Treadstone’s research doctors, Rachel Weisz, Cross must escape murderous government agents, and journey to the Phillipines, the source of the drugs that keep him smart and strong, in search of a means to make his physical condition permanent, since the red and blue pills won’t be coming anymore.

There is no problem with continuing the mythology of Treadstone.  Robert Ludlum created a universe, and there is certainly room for another character to step in, but it needs to be done correctly, not like this.  The main thrust of the film concerns scenes of Cross intercut with a bunch of random talking government heads, one of which is a ridiculously wasted Edward Norton, who sit around barking about how terrible it would be if Cross gets away.  Names are not important whatsoever, the film is not concerned in the least about developing characters beyond a good guy/bad guy mentality.  Jason Bourne’s amnesia was the first film’s driving force, which allowed the audience to discover, along with Bourne, the intricate plot unfolding against him.  The Bourne Legacy is not so inclined to give the audience a reason to invest their time or interest.  This film is a huge bore from start to finish, and especially finish, where it manages to go that extra step from bad to worse, with a third act revelation that there is yet another top secret agency which was working on an even more super-agent that, according to one character, “does not have the problems that Treadstone agents do.”  Well, isn’t that convenient; not for the audience though, who has to sit through a prolonged chase scene for its own sake, between a super-agent, and an ultra-super-agent.  The Bourne Legacy is pure nonsense, and an insult to anyone who valued the care that was put into its two predecessors.  Tony Gilroy, who wrote and directed the great Michael Clayton a few years ago, and who Matt Damon publicly vilified for turning in an unreadable rough draft of The Bourne Ultimatum, clearly got the last laugh here, all the way to the bank, and at the audience’s expense.  I sincerely hope he takes the money he made from this and puts it into something he actually cares about, because he just utterly destroyed  any legacy Aaron Cross could hope to leave behind.

*1/2 stars out of *****