Matt Damon's gone, but fourth entry of spy franchise has new tormented hero

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Jeremy Renner as Aaron Cross in a scene from "The Bourne Legacy." (UNIVERSAL PICTURES / MARY CYBULSKI / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Movie Review

• The Bourne Legacy
• Starring Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz
• Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne
• PG
• 135 minutes

• 3 1/2 stars out of five

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Renner and Weisz race through the streets of Manila. (CP)

Given that this fourth entry in the Bourne movies is something of a squeeze at the franchise cash cow, a better title might have been The Bourne Lactation.

But co-writer/director Tony Gilroy (who had a hand in the screenplay of all the previous Bourne movies but did not direct any of them) adds something fresh into the mix with a new tormented hero, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), and a different dynamic: The Bourne Legacy is largely an old-school damsel-in-distress story.

Another super-assassin in the secret program that also created Matt Damon's amnesiac superspy Jason Bourne, Cross is training in the wilds of Alaska when the events of the third film, The Bourne Ultimatum, are taking place. A cadre of ruthless government overseers, headed by Edward Norton's Col. Eric Byer, is forced to pull the plug on the program, which means disposing of all the super-agents.

The resourceful Cross survives the attempt on his life, which involves an unmanned drone airplane. Utilizing his set of finely honed skills, he beelines for a medical facility where he has been prescribed "chems" that sustain his super-agent mojo. Unfortunately, the whole plug-pulling thing encompasses the medical team that helped create Team Bourne, resulting in a massacre that leaves only one survivor, Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz).

Aaron and Marta, it appears, need each other to survive.

As with the previous films, drama is wrung from a combination of manly running/fighting/shooting in one location with government operative monitoring in another video-screen-equipped location. The Bourne movies nail the contemporary phenomenon of remote-control violence perpetrated by white-collar techies who are both physically and emotionally removed from the messy business of bloodletting.

Indeed, the movie actually turns on that dehumanizing divide, nicely summarized in a scene between Aaron and Marta in which he learns that during all their previous medical encounters, she only knew him as "No. 5."

"That's all I am to you? A number?" Cross asks.

In the context of a big summer action movie, Gilroy manages to get in a few well-placed kicks at big pharmaceutical multinationals, as well as military institutions that glibly justify atrocity. (In a flashback, Byer explains the way of the covert world to Cross, labelling themselves sin eaters. "We are morally indefensible and absolutely necessary.")

But none of that would matter if Gilroy weren't capable of generating considerable tension, whether in a pretty spectacular climactic chase through the streets of Manila, or the especially riveting scene in which Marta is visited at home by a government psychologist with an unsavoury notion of the concept of debriefing.

By the end, a fifth movie looks to be a distinct possibility. Based on the strength of this one, I wouldn't object -- as long as they kept the name Bourne out of the title.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other voices

Selected excerpts of reviews of The Bourne Legacy.

The Gilroys -- co-writer/director Tony, writer Dan -- don't kill or wreck The Bourne Legacy. But this Treadstone retread just treads water, and that's no way to make it Bourne again.

-- Roger Moore, McClatchy-Tribune News Service

The Bourne Legacy is always gripping in the moment. The problem is in getting the moments to add up.

-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Despite its muddled origins, this fourth movie is much more of a bang and less of a whimper than any of us feared, and Jeremy Renner is emerging as the intelligent person's action star.

-- Peter Bradshaw, Guardian (U.K.)

It bodes well for the future of the franchise that Renner and Weisz share not only a gripping predicament but something more important: chemistry.

-- Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Narratively it's a pretzel, half-baked.

-- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 10, 2012 D1