Bourne Again

This past weekend, I caught the new spin-off/sequel in the Jason Bourne franchise, The Bourne Legacy. Continuing in the same universe as the visceral spy-assassin trilogy starring Matt Damon, this movie transfers the narrative to a new enhanced killer played by rising star Jeremy Renner. Government officials have decided to erase the entire program of which Jason Bourne was a part, and now a new operative, Aaron Cross, is running for his life.

The film is not quite as good as the three preceding it, but it's still a fun ride. It's also incredibly consistent with what has come before... perhaps even to a fault, at times. Some of the early sequences in the film exist only to anchor where and when all this new action is happening in relation to events from the second and third films. And the plot itself follows an arc quite similar to that of the first film.

It's tough to say what I really might have asked for from the plot. On the one hand, changing focus to another spy in the program could have been the opportunity to broaden the scope of the storytelling. We could have seen actual missions, events of larger global stakes. But then, this ultimately isn't an American James Bond. The Bourne movies have all been marked by incredibly personal stakes, and have simply been about one man struggling to survive.

And so it is that the new movie puts this new character on the run. The problems of navigating around the world with few resources are familiar. The types of action sequences he gets tangled up in are also familiar. They're certainly well done in this movie; the pulse-pounding motorcycle chase that caps the film, for example, is an extended visceral thrill. But even as it wows, there's a bit of an undercurrent of "seen it before."

But if there are any shortcomings in the film, they lie in the script, not in the cast. Jeremy Renner is a great lead. If you didn't want to see a Hawkeye movie after watching The Avengers, I think this movie might persuade you. Rachel Weisz is a good companion/foil for him, realistically weak, but also realistically strong when the scene calls for it. Edward Norton is also fun; his part may be one of the least nuanced things he's ever done on film, but he clearly has fun playing a no-nuance bad guy.

This may not be one to run out to the theater to see, but it's worth checking out later on video if you like action thrillers. I grade it a B-.