Stars Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton with Stacy Keach and Scott Glenn Directed by Tony Gilroy For as much as an average audience would enjoy the Bourne trilogy for its action scenes, there is a flip side to all that, which is the political thriller that underlines each of the movies, and that continues here. The Bourne Legacy actually focusses on that, starting off with events that overlap with the previous movie, The Bourne Ultimatum. Particularly the investigation by one Simon Ross that kicked off the previous movie and set Jason Bourne on his path back to Treadstone and New York. While there are many references to the events of Ultimatum, Legacy deals more with the periphery and shows what else is behind the curtain of the Treadstone and Blackbriar programs mentioned in the previous movies. Like most of these secret programs where one arm does not know what the hand or fingers are doing, matters get fairly convoluted very quickly, and the average viewer would just have to 'go with the flow'. There are some moral questions brought up over the actions of these men and they are dismissed just as quickly in one very telling scene. So with the events here overlapping with the events in Ultimatum, as well as the fallout the what happened at the end there, the focus isn't so much on Jason Bourne himself but on another agent named Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), from a more advanced program called Outcome ("Treadstone without the inconsistencies" as one charter puts it.) As with Jason Bourne, the programs are meant to create the perfect operative and this becomes very apparent only in the final action sequence when we see the next level agent hunting Cross behave during the chase - cold, calculating and so driven that even collateral damage is not a consideration anymore. At least Bourne himself regained some humanity by the end of his story. The Bourne Legacy is very much about world-building as writer and director, Tony Gilroy, opens up the rest of the world we got a glimpse of the first three movies which Gilroy himself had a hand in crafting. We do see what happened to a couple of characters from Ultimatum, in particular, Noah Vosen (David Strathrain) and Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), and even those scenes seem to suggest that it's never going to be over, and they're just the fringes of the whole puzzle. A lot of the movie is focussed here, and we see the fallout of that impacting on Aaron Cross. While the movie starts off much like The Bourne Identity (a body in water), Cross is nothing like Bourne in that he isn't trying to figure out who he is. His quest is a little different, but his path is very much like Bourne's and by the end, you might feel that you've just seen a remake or a reboot, mixed with a sidequel. While the action, usually with Cross, feels a little more toned down - or less frenetic due to the loss of Paul Greengrass and his herky-jerky handheld documentary style - Gilroy manages to keep things on edge well enough. Series stunt designer and coordinator, David Bradley, is also the second unit director and it feels like he took full charge of the extended closing action set-piece which includes just about everything we've had before - running and jumping across rooftops, extreme close-quarters fist fights, car-chases and motorbike chases. the lack of more hand-to-hand may disappoint some viewers, but what little there is remains as brutal as ever and the action is intense. Renner plays Cross more sympathetically than one would expect, and he manages to have his character be nothing like Jason Bourne. The idea that Cross and Bourne may cross paths is an intriguing one as, ultimately and more than coincidentally, they have similar agendas in the end. The only thing lacking is a sense of finality. The rest of the stars do well in their given roles, with significant cameos from the returning stars. Rachel Weisz also steps up significantly, and it took a while for me to even register that it was her in the role of Dr. Marta Shearing. While Edward Norton brings the smarm as you'd expect of him, but it also feels like he's a touch wasted, manipulating behind the scenes and hiding away in rooms or behind monitor screens. In all, even with the attempt to take things in a new direction with a new star and new characters, the spectre of Bourne isn't too far away with the many references throughout the movie. The score by James Newton Howard retains several themes created by John Powell for the previous three movies. Even Moby returns to close the movie with another rendition of "Extreme Ways". It really feels transitory, but at least, the makes some progress and it sets up a lot of things which we can only hope will be tackled in the inevitable follow-up.
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