The Bourne Legacy [Blu-ray]

It?s hard to comprehend a movie called The Bourne Legacy that doesn?t actually feature the character Jason Bourne. Not a sequel, it?s an attempt to expand the Bourne universe and continue to make piles of Bourne money without actually having to pay Matt Damon most of it. It sorta works.

The Movie:

You need a few things for a Bourne movie. The name Bourne needs to be in the title, even if the character of Bourne doesn?t actually appear, like, say, in The Bourne Legacy. You need a specially trained agent who is no longer following the rules and needs to be killed by a government agency. In Legacy, you get Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), taking over for Matt Damon?s Jason Bourne. You also need a sleek hunter in a tech heavy war room barking out lines like, ?Come on people, we need to find this guy, where is he?? In this case, it?s Byer (Edward Norton), taking over for Chris Cooper, Joan Allen, and David Strathairn. You need a fat guy who is egging on the sleek guy to kill Bourne or the Bourne equivalent. In this case it?s Turso (Stacy Keach), taking over for Brian Cox and Albert Finney. You need a secret government killing-type of program and if you?ve used the names Treadstone and Blackbriar, then try Outcome. Sounds kinda ominous, right? Also, you need Tony Gilroy to write the script like he has for all the Bourne movies, as well as exotic locales, awesome fights and chases, and a convoluted plot that no one really understands.

The Bourne Legacy has all the parts but doesn?t quite pull them together in a unique or interesting way. It?s a decent action/thriller but doesn?t have the energy, intelligence, or intensity of the earlier films. It?s B-rated Bourne, setting things up for a future franchise that might improve. It?s not so much on Renner, who does a good job as the medically enhanced (not in that way) asset who needs to be killed. The problem is the exposition as the writers set up a world running parallel to the events in The Bourne Ultimatum. People talk and talk and talk about Outcome, medical enhancements, relationships between characters from the other Bourne movies and this movie, and on and on. It?s the curse of the first movie in a series, it has to set everything up and that?s just not all that interesting to watch.

We?ve also seen a lot of this before. Norton?s Byer, unbelievably, chases Cross and a doctor who is also targeted to be killed (Rachel Weisz) by setting up a room with computer screens and monitors. It exactly mirrors scenes in the other movies. It?s like Gilroy, who is also the director on this film in addition to co-writer, can?t fathom an antagonist unless he?s in a war room. How about getting Norton out in the field after Cross? How about not writing yet another secret operation group run by people who seem to be carbon copies of the people in the first movies? How about making a movie about a secret agent and calling it Secret Agent Man, rather than trying to cash in on the Bourne name, since this really feels like that. The stunts are good, Renner is good, Norton is as good as Cooper or Strathairn, so the movie does have some pulse pounding fun, but it doesn?t knock your socks off. Pull out Identity or Ultimatum if you want that.

The Disc:

The Bourne Legacy is a nice set. While the movie doesn?t dazzle, Universal does toss in a good selection of extras to go along with stellar picture and sound quality, plus a DVD and electronic copy. The disc also contains the required three elements to a good home entertainment release: a commentary, making-of extras, and deleted scenes.

Everyone and their brother, literally, are invited to participate in the commentary. Director/writer Tony Gilroy, writer Dan Gilroy, and editor John Gilroy all take part, in addition to the Gilroy family?s 12 nieces and nephews. Not really, instead cinematographer Robert Elswit, production designer Kevin Thompson, and second unit director Dan Bradley also take part. If that sounds like too many people, it is. There?s lots of good info here, but it?s sometimes lost when you don?t know who is talking.

What would be considered the making-of featurette is broken into bite-sized chunks of five to eight minutes each, totaling about 40 minutes. It includes the decisions that went into moving the series away from Jason Bourne but still using the previous films as a jumping off point, like the character of Aaron Cross, the location shooting, and most interestingly, the climactic motorcycle chase. This is the type of behind-the-scenes stuff that a fan of the movie wants to see. The ?how did they do it? of the big action piece. The other extras are also pretty good, but sections like ?Re-Bourne? and ?Enter Aaron Cross,? which focus on character and story rather than action, don?t offer much insight. These are for people who haven?t actually seen the movie, rather than for those who have and want inside info. There is a two minute test footage on the fight between Cross and the wolf that is pretty (unintentionally) hilarious. Make sure to check it out.

The deleted scenes only last seven minutes but do add some information that is interesting. A scene between Aaron and a highway patrolman is pretty tense. Another quick scene explains why Aaron was trying to extra meds when he got to the cabin at the beginning of the movie. Nothing critical, but the scenes are nice to see.

The Bourne Legacy is an OK movie with a nice Blu-ray release. You wouldn?t go wrong just letting The Bourne Ultimatum wrap up your Bourne movie experience and skipping Legacy altogether, but as a generic thriller, it gets the job done.

Distributor: Universal Studios Home EntertainmentStarring: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Oscar Isaac, Joan Allen, Albert FinneyProduced by: Frank Marshall, Patrick Crowley, Ben Smith, Jeffrey WeinerWritten by: Tony Gilroy, Dan Gilroy

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The Bourne Legacy

The Bourne Legacy arrives as the promised continuation of a mega-franchise, but it's worth remembering that even Jason Bourne had humble origins. The Bourne Identity arrived in 2002 as a sleeper hit-- it finished second at the box office its opening weekend to Scooby-Doo-- and it took many people a while to cotton to the way Matt Damon and Doug Liman had given the spy thriller a sleek, soulful update. But Bourne Legacy arrives all wrapped up in The Bourne Ultimatum, both in terms of expectations and quite literally in its plot-- understanding the first 30 minutes of the new film practically requires re-watching Ultimatum, or at the very least, carefully parsing its Wikipedia plot summary.

Because, as you may remember, the Bourne movies are really complex, and The Bourne Legacy shoulders the double challenge of establishing its own mythology while jumping off from the previous trilogy-- something writer/director Tony Gilroy clearly relishes, having written all of the previous Bourne films, but can't quite master this time. The opening act of the film jumps frantically from government war rooms to foreign cities to the mountains of Alaska, as a very tense and very good Edward Norton tries to get a handle on the havoc wreaked by Jason Bourne in Moscow and London (from the beginning of Ultimatum), all while our hero Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) undergoes his own Arctic training in the same program that once created Bourne-- well, mostly. Familiar faces like David Strathairn, Joan Allen and Albert Finney are relegated to the background, and Norton's Eric Byer is the head of not Treadstone, but Operation Outcome-- "Treadstone, without the inconsistency." No, I'm not quite sure what that means either.

There's a whole lot to chew on in the beginning-- and we haven't even gotten to Rachel Weisz as the scientist working in the lab that creates meds for these super-soldiers-- and it's almost frustrating to keep returning to Aaron out in the wilderness, managing by luck and some skill to escape the deliberate execution of every other Outcome agent. But eventually Aaron makes it out of the wilderness, tracks down Weisz's Dr. Marta Shearling and saves her from her own execution, and the two of them go on the run, in a manner very familiar to Bourne fans. Aaron's motivation isn't quite as existential as Jason Bourne's was-- he's looking for more of the medicine that makes him smarter and faster-- but it works, and with Norton dispatching all the forces of the shadow government after them, the cat-and-mouse format doles out the required thrills, with more than enough surprises to keep it interesting.

But while Gilroy clearly loves managing all the moving parts of the expansive plot, he's less skilled with the action, especially when it comes to the big motorbike chase sequence at the end, which is incomprehensible. And though Renner is a truly terrific action star, with the pugnacious face and hooded eyes that suggest he could snap at any moment, he's just no Matt Damon; Damon's Bourne always struck you as the boy next door thrust into an uncontrollable situation, and even when snapping necks, he seemed to regret it. Aaron Cross seems to have no such qualms, and when he takes down diligent security guards or filches a gold watch to provide for his next escape, there seems to be genuine menace behind it. That would work in many movies, but it's a tougher fit in the Bourne universe, where the violence can get so grim that you at least need to feel for the guy who's throwing the punches.

It would have been nice to embrace Aaron Cross in a movie more like The Bourne Identity, which sneaks up on you and gives you larger plot questions to answer only after you've gotten to know the guy. But the rule of franchises is that this new movie must be enormous, so Legacy expands for something as big and important as Ultimatum, without putting in the time to get to that point. Perhaps in a second movie Aaron Cross can stand on his own, but for now he feels trapped in the shadow of what came before.

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