Rachel Weisz and Jeremy Renner in “The Bourne Legacy”
Release date: August 10, 2012
Directed by: Tony Gilroy
Screenplay by: Tony Gilroy & Dan Gilroy
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach,
Dennis Boutsikaris, Oscar Issac, Joan Allen, Albert Finney, David Strathairn, Scott Glenn
Rating: PG-13; Running Time: 135 minutes
2012′s summer movie season may very well be credited with the inception of the unorthodox spinoff. Starting with the smartly orchestrated, hit smash mash-up of The Avengers, the retro-morph of Ridley Scott’s Alien into Prometheus followed next. And now, bringing up the muddled rear is the fourth installment of the Bourne franchise, The Bourne Legacy. The film is sort of a spinoff, and sort of not, with the storyline running in an obfuscated parallel construction. Best to consider it a side-quel of a sort and question no further.
There’s already innumerable questions causing our collective heads to spin. It doesn’t help that the plot incessantly floods us with governmental alphabet soups (NRAG, LARX, CIA of course) as well as shadowy nouns that even Sarah Palin wouldn’t use to name her children (Treadstone, Blackbriar, Outcome, Candent, Sterisyn, Morlanta). With a stockpile of unnecessary entanglements from the filmmakers Gilroy — Tony as director/co-writer and brother Dan as co-writer – the best we can do is prepare ourselves by re-screening or reading the plot summary of the last installment, 2007′s The Bourne Ultimatum, and simply wait for The Bourne Legacy’s extraneous blabber to pass. Because once that’s over and done with, it’s quite a show.
Offering a non-spoiler that just might help: In a counterintelligence version of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the spy syndicate honchos have decided that due to Jason Bourne, their widespread covert operations are too much of a liability and it’s curtains … torn or otherwise. As we’ve seen in earlier Bourne films, these power-mad architects treat their spy soldiers as if they were made of tin, to be tossed aside at will. And so the unfortunate lone wolf agent Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), one of only six biomedically-enhanced super-spies in the Outcome program, suddenly finds himself targeted for extinction. Calling the shots is Edward Norton’s Colonel Byer, barking his increasingly tedious one note of rage throughout.
[For Kimberly Gadette's full review and rating on doddle, please click here]