A film
review by Roger Ebert, August 8, 2012.
The Bourne Legacy is the story of a man who needs some
medication and spends the whole movie trying to get it. This is good medicine.
As the film opens, he dives naked into a river in Alaska, brings up a sealed
tube from the bottom, takes a little blue pill and a little green pill, wraps
himself in a thermal blanket by his fire, and then backpacks across a mountain
range while fighting off wolves. Some of the climbing involves steep walls
without use of rope or pitons.
Aaron Cross
is not a superhero. Like Jason Bourne before him, he's an agent of The Program,
a secret U.S. intelligence project that involves modifying the human genome to
produce men with incredible physical and mental agility, and the skill set of
an Eagle Scout with nine pounds of merit badges.
Cross is
played by Jeremy Renner with the
kind of focus and detached courage he showed in The Hurt Locker. Because he isn't referred to by name for a long
time, and because everybody keeps saying Bourne is still out there, and because I had not seen the trailer, I wondered for
awhile if perhaps Renner was now playing Bourne, but the film finally,
mercifully, produces a wanted poster showing Matt Damon, which clears that up.
The movie
spends a lot of time in a Manhattan command center for The Program, which is
chockablock with computer screens and communications equipment, and can
apparently tap into any surveillance camera in the world. In this room we meet
the masterminds of The Program, grim veterans played by Scott Glenn, Stacy Keach and Albert
Finney, and headed by Edward Norton.
They spend a lot of time in each other's faces, trading jargon and spycraft.
These men have decided to terminate The Program by giving all their expert
agents a triangular yellow pill that causes them to bleed from the left nostril
and die. Always the left nostril.
After Cross
eludes a drone equipped with a missile in Alaska and fights off more wolves, he
makes contact with Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel
Weisz), who has a Ph.D. and two
post-doctoral fellowships and knows all about the pills. Now there is the
best sequence of violence in the movie, which involves a lab technician played
by Zeljko Ivanek. Then Cross and
Shearing join forces in a desperate quest to stay one jump ahead of the masters
of The Program while traveling around the globe to Manila, where the
medications are manufactured. The Rachel Weisz character spends a lot more time
on screen than females are often allowed in action movies, even though she
isn't used for sex appeal. Her performance stands up strongly beside Renner's.
These meds
are a virus that alters genes. You can take booster pills from time to time, or
with a new iteration you can be locked in,
which is what Cross seeks. He has become accustomed to possessing incredible
muscle and mind power. One can only guess what other benefits the pills bestow;
to my knowledge Cross never eats or drinks during the entire film.
The Bourne Legacy is always gripping in the moment.
The problem is in getting the moments to add up. I freely confess that for at
least the first 30 minutes I had no clear idea of why anything was happening.
The dialogue is concise, the cinematography is arresting and the plot is murky.
There are
three major chase scenes — by car, by parkour and by motorcycle. Parkour, you
recall, is the art of running up walls and dancing over rooftops, and
apparently comes along with the pills. The motorcycle chase takes place in
Manila, after Cross and Shearing steal a cycle, the police give chase, and one
particularly determined individual with dark aviator glasses persists beyond
all reason. Since he doesn't have a single word of dialogue, it's impossible to
say if he has any idea how important Cross and Shearing are, but he keeps
coming like the Energizer Bunny.
This chase
lasts way too long. I glanced twice at my watch. It goes up and down stairs and
down the middle lanes of expressways, and causes countless crashes, and is
edited in that frustrating style where you see fragments of action but don't
always have the whole picture. At its conclusion — poof! — the wind goes out of
the picture's sails, and a final scene sets up a sequel. I wonder how long
Bourne's name will stay in the series titles. After all, he's still Out There.
Labels:
action, adventure, mystery, spy, thriller
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