I knew what kind of movie The
Bourne Legacy was when it typed out time, date and location details at the
bottom of each new scene. So here we are in Maryland on Tuesday. Here is Wednesday
afternoon in Alaska .
Let’s jet to the Philippines
at midnight Friday. Bring your passport to this one, you might need it.
Well, I’m lying. Not about the time stamps — that’s true, albeit
cliché — but about when I knew what kind of movie Legacy would be. I guess I knew what kind of movie it would be in 2002
when I saw it the first time, when it was called The Bourne Identity.
See, there is a secret spy, more secret than most. His name is
Jason Bourne. He had amnesia, but conquered it. Now he’s hunted by the people
who created him, people in the United
States intelligence community. He was played
by Matt Damon in three movies with confusing titles: Bourne Identity, Bourne
Ultimatum and Bourne Supremacy.
The first one was solid, but the second and third were polarizing, especially
with the labyrinthine motives of the many, many characters and also because of
the choppy-blurry-shaky camera editing, which is now the norm in action films.
Now, in Legacy, here is
Aaron Cross, a super spy like Bourne. Because of Bourne’s antics, the spy
program that created Bourne and Cross is eliminated, which in the film’s
universe means everyone is killed, their homes are pounded flat, their pets are
sent to slaughterhouses in third-world countries and their complimentary
subscription to Spy Monthly is canceled.
And you thought the Tea Party didn’t mess around when it came to slashing
government programs — these guys here are no joke.
Cross is targeted for execution, but escapes a drone-fired rocket
in the Alaskan wilderness by forcefully feeding a wolf a surgical tracking
device that he carved out of his pelvis with a hunting knife. (Let’s pause here
while that last sentence marinates in your brain a little.) Anyway, what is
happening to Cross is happening because of Bourne and at the same time as
Bourne’s movies, which doesn’t make this a prequel or a sequel. It’s a
tangential and simultaneous adventure, a midquel, if you will.
It would be a cool idea if it were somehow different than any of
the other Bourne movies, but it’s
more of the same: Spy is hunted, spy flees, other spies are recruited to find
the spy, spy meets girl, spy saves girl, spy outwits other spy, and intercut
into all this are boring people in suits stalking hallways and agonizing over
satellite feeds. It’s the same thing all over again here, but this time with a
new actor. This must be how those photographers at old-time photo studios feel:
Every day is spent taking the same photo of families dressed as cowboys, and
the only thing that ever changes are the faces.
The face in Legacy is a
familiar one — Jeremy Renner. He gave us life and rage and pain in The Hurt Locker, and ever since he’s
been a mindless action hero in The
Avengers, Mission: Impossible 4
and now here as a Bourne clone. I admire Renner’s work, but I don’t see why his
version of Bourne, or the whole movie for that matter, was even necessary. It
all feels so familiar: the shootouts, the car chases, the Greco-Roman grappling
in hallways. I guess if you want to see the same movie again, have at it with Bourne Legacy, made by a studio that is
so smart it’s learned how to get people to pay twice for the same thing.
I’m being very critical, I know, but I expect more from movies.
I’m dismayed when I see films plagiarizing themselves, or falling back on all
the same ideas. Did no one want to explore uncharted territory? Just look at
Rachel Weisz, an accomplished actress with a big bouquet of talent. She plays a
marked-for-death scientist who spends much of the movie being pulled and thrown
out of danger during shootouts and chase sequences. When she read the script
did she not recognize Chain Reaction,
the clever 1996 science-thriller where she does exactly the same thing?
Some of Legacy’s flaws
are compounded by director Tony Gilroy’s insistence on linking the original
trilogy with this trilogy (yes, expect two more Renner Bourne movies). There are new characters, like the grayish spy
director played by Edward Norton, but much of the film goes out of its way to
introduce old characters, old plotlines and random bits of Bourne minutiae to
eventually link the two spy movies. So if you start to feel like this whole
movie is meaningless filler — like rice in a Chipotle burrito — until we get to
the inevitable shot in Movie 6 of Bourne and Cross spy-mashing together, don’t
worry that’s normal.
All this random bits of plot might be great for fans of Robert
Ludlum’s Bourne novels, but it all
feels very confusing, like re-joining a TV show after skipping several seasons.
Whole sequences are spent talking about Treadstone and Black Briar and Hirsch
and Landy, but only the most hardcore Bourne fans will recognize these details
and what they ultimately mean. And then there’s poor Scott Glenn, who’s given a
two-minute role that makes no sense at all, though I’m sure the next film will
give him a more substantial part that explains it. But then why introduce him
here when it could have just as easily been done in the next movie?
I’m laying a whomping on The
Bourne Legacy, but it’s not all bad. The action is thrilling, and there’s a
motorcycle chase at the end that aspires to be the mother of all motorcycle
chases. I liked how one character has no gun to shoot so she takes off her
helmet and throws it at a pursuing spy. A scene at an Alaskan forest cabin is
exciting only because the mood of the film hadn’t been set, and I was unsure of
who the villain was. The tension ratchets tighter and tighter until the payoff,
which turns out to be different than what I expected. Then there’s Renner, who
is kinda marvelous as a spy. I wish the movie focused more on him than all the
behind-the-scenes computer stuff. What would you rather see: Renner doing his
spy mambo or Ed Norton staring at a computer monitor playing Space Invaders?
One more thing I must discuss: the spree killing. It came from
out of nowhere. The sequence begins with a man coldly, methodically stalking
and shooting unarmed victims in a science lab. I found the victims’ anguished
pleading and cries to be especially horrific, and then gunshots ring out on the
soundtrack and I felt like the film was punishing the audience. I’ve seen
violent movies since the Aurora
theater shooting, but none made me as uncomfortable as this. We live in a different
world, and scenes like this will twist stomachs into knots. This film, a
high-adventure spy movie with nothing to say, never earns the right to play
with those emotions.
All totaled up, I did not like The Bourne Legacy. People who will pay again and again for the same
action movie and Bourne fans — are they one in the same? — will probably love
it.
