"The Bourne Legacy" Review

When I arrived home from the Radio 96.1 screening of The Bourne Legacy last night, my wife wanted to know how the writers handled the fact that Matt Damon - you know, Jason Bourne, who the movie is named after - is not in the film.

I explained the basic premise - that, because Jason Bourne has escaped the trail of the CIA and leaked information about Operation Blackbriar to a reporter, the agency has decided to dismantle another one of it's secret programs and must kill everyone associated with it.

Stop right there, she told me.  "Really???", she says indignantly.  "That's the plot?  And it was good??"

I understood what she was getting at.  On the surface, it sounds like every movie ever made about the CIA or (insert spy agency here).  In fact, it sounds like every other Bourne installment.  In many ways it is, but in others it is, in fact, better.

The Bourne Legacy offers up perhaps the slowest (read: deliberate) first 20 minutes and fastest final 20 minutes of any film this summer.  We are quickly introduced to Aaron Cross, played by the excellent Jeremy Renner, who was awesome in The Hurt Locker and, more recently, as Hawkeye in The Avengers.  Although reference is made numerous times to Jason Bourne (through name and pictures), Renner is a completely worthy successor to Damon in this series.

It turns out that Cross is one of the operatives in the program the CIA needs to dismantle...only he's slightly more difficult to kill than the others.  While he's on the run, he meets up with one of the doctors involved with the program (Marta Shearing, played by Rachel Weisz) and wouldn't you know it - the CIA wants her dead, too.  And thus the chase of both our heroes begins.

What elevates The Bourne Legacy isn't the plot - it's the attention to detail director Tony Gilroy takes in each scene to build suspense.  What drew me in was each real-time move by the CIA during the chase.  From the operation of heat-seeking drones to reviewing cameras for facial recognition to combing flight manifests up and down the east coast, I found the tracking down process to be fascinating.

The final 20 minutes of the movie features a chase scene that gets us as close to the action as possible.  While some chase scenes are viewed by the audience from afar or via an arial view, the pursuit that takes place in the Phillipines sets you right on the motorcycle - inside the alley - smashing into the side of a bus - wiping out into a pylon...and so on.  

It seems many of the initial reviews are mixed - the reviewer sitting next to me, at the conclusion of the film, grumbled "Underwhelming" and too many reviews I'm reading are comparing this Bourne movie to the original trilogy.

I recommend that, when you watch this film, you let it stand on it's own....but even if you decide to compare it with the others, you'll find it holds up marvelously.

Grade: A

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