chris kilby
Posts: 1189
Joined: 31/3/2010
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So who’s that familiar figure floating in the water at the start of The Bourne Legacy? Why, it’s Captain Birdseye! Jeremy Renner sporting a very unflattering scraggly beard the whole of the first act which just had me thinking of Monty Python: It’s… not Jason Bourne. Good idea that; reminding your audience that the star of the franchise has gone AWOL.
The name’s Cross… Aaron Cross. (Cross? He was absolutely livid! Musta read the script.) Or was it Kenneth James? It could have been Kenneth Williams for all I cared. I like Jeremy Renner. I’ve liked him since 28 Weeks Later and I’m delighted he’s finally made it. But a good supporting player, I’m just not convinced he’s leading man material.
He’s no Matt Damon, that’s for sure. And Aaron Cross is no Jason Bourne. Wrestling wolves with his bare hands? That’s not Jason Bourne. That’s Wolverine. No, that’s Liam Neeson! He wishes. And hunted by drones? How ironic…
Renner’s pugilist mug is even more battered-looking than the current James Bond’s, which must have been confusing for Mrs Bond, aka: Rachel Weisz. (I wonder how 007 feels about his missus playing Bond girl to a rival super-spy?) Renner’s not unlike Daniel Craig actually, the Bond and Bourne franchises playing pass-the-influential-parcel at the moment. And I did like his improvised codpiece made out of a baking tin like McGuyver meets Gordon Ramsay. Here’s one he made earlier…
Not a sequel exactly, what is The Bourne Legacy? A side-quel? An extranequel? A superfluquel? Or just a tired re-hash? Another pointless runaround that goes through the motions in a cynical attempt to squeeze a few more bucks out of a concept which, after three admittedly excellent movies, had already run its course? Yup, it’s a sequel alright!
It’s the old law of diminishing returns and that’s as immutable as gravity. Most franchises are lucky if they make it to three half-decent entries and even that’s a struggle. Good sequels are like gold dust. Good threequels are about as common as a virgin in a knocking shop. The only true exception to this rule being Bond of course. Which is ironic considering some of the ungracious things Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass have said about him which, apart from sounding petulant and unprofessional, was also kinda ironic when you consider that a) Bourne wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for Bond (as Robert Ludlum would’ve been the first to acknowledge) and, b) like Bond, the Bourne movies are all the bleedin’ same, innit. Especially when, good as Bourne was, turns out he was just another Matt Helm!
Not many franchises last 50 years and precious few survive the departure of their star. As the eponymous Bourne franchise may be about to discover. The sad fact is this film wouldn’t have been any better even with Damon and Greengrass on board. The Bourne Ultimatum (“I want a rolled-up magazine and I want it now!”) was good but it was already showing signs of strain.
A lot has been made about them, but I didn’t have a particular problem with the magic pills and Alex Cross’ borderline super-powers. The headaches were an issue in the first film and Bourne himself was already exhibiting worryingly Spider-Man-like powers of agility and “spider-sense” while tracking Julia Stiles across the rooftops of Tangiers in his last outing. If you were prepared to swallow that, you should be prepared to swallow a few pills.
Having said that, I wasn’t entirely sure that reducing Cross to a sweating, shivering junkie going through the agonies of withdrawal for a painfully protracted amount of the running time was a good idea. The Bourne Legacy? The Trainspotting Legacy more like! And speaking of cold turkeys… Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a fuckin’ big television. Choose to extend a franchise which had reached a natural conclusion way past its sell-by date. Choose a really shitty, pointless, superfluous sequel. Or not. So The Bourne Legacy was a cynical ca$h-in. What sequel isn’t?
This is the second super-hero Renner’s played this summer. But I didn’t realise Hawkeye was part of the super-soldier programme as well. I’m not being glib or facetious here. Well, maybe a bit. But The Bourne Legacy’s fucked-up, pill-popping super-soldiers do seem to have been influenced by Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again. Or is that Bourne Again? First Spider-Bourne. Now Super-Soldier. These guys really are Super-Spies! What next – capes?
We’ve come a long way since The Bourne Identity, that’s for sure. At least that was grounded in some sort of semblance of pseudo-reality. It’s what interested original director, Doug Liman, in this material in the first place. The son of a US senator who was part of the Iran-Contra hearings and cross-examined Oliver North, he actually had something to say about the real world of spies and what’s colloquially known as intelligence. I’m not sure exactly what that was, but at least he tried. Sadly, intelligence is something else which has gone AWOL.
(Even the music’s not the same. James Newton Howard’s score is more Heat than Bourne, Jon Powell having also gone AWOL. And it “ends” with a slow boat to The Philipines and yet another remix of Moby’s Extreme Ways. Which is a bit like Austin Powers half-inching the James Bond Theme.)
When it comes to Bourne’s success as a sequel-generating franchise, I think Doug Liman has been unfairly neglected. Sure, The Bourne Identity was a notorious if not legendarily troubled shoot; largely attributed to its notoriously indecisive director. But he started this thing. He established the style and set the tone. Liman revolutionised and humanised the action genre (and Bond in the process) yet Greengrass gets all the credit. I don’t think that’s fair.
Stylistically The Bourne Legacy is still the same too. The same writer-turned-director; the same second unit director – Dan Bradley, another largely unsung hero. The Bourne Legacy has all the action and superficial trappings of the Bourne trilogy but none of the heart. Jason Bourne’s search for his lost identity, for his very humanity, was the heart and soul of this series. And without that The Bourne Legacy is just another action movie with an increasingly unkillable protagonist who ain’t got time to bleed!
Tony Gilroy is a good writer but only a so-so writer-director. I found Michael Clayton massively overrated, hugely disappointing and contrived as hell. While he superficially apes Greengrass and Liman’s style, this tired retread is just going through the motions.
It’s just one damn thing after another. The climactic set-piece motorbike chase through the streets of Manilla while too long does recapture some of the old Dan Bradley magic but we’ve seen it all before. And the sight of Renner on a motorbike impassively sporting shades does rather comically evoke memories of another unstoppable icon. He was impervious to bullets too!
I couldn’t watch this without EMPIRE’s kiss-off line ringing in my ears – “This shit has metastisised.” So thanks for that. “If he didn’t viral out he’s gonna run out of brain.” What, like the script? How did Gilroy’s actors ever spout this risible guff with a straight face?
That’s Ed Norton in the David Strathairn role of heavyweight actor slumming it as the prematurely silver-haired bad guy squinting at vast computer screens while barking clichés into a mobile who gets the dubious honour of spouting these zingers while looking like he’s about to fire his agent.
But it’s poor old Rachel Weisz, already saddled with the thankless role of screaming victim/love interest, who gets lumbered with the most incomprehensible pseudo-scientific technobollock dire-logue this side of Star Trek. “Viral receptor mapping”? “Mondochromial cellural uptake”? “Genomic targetting”? Christ on a bike! And there are pages of this utterly incomprehensible psycho-pharmachological bullshit (which may or may not have some basis in fact – who knows? Who cares?) in place of actual dialogue.
She’d have been as well reading out the ingredients on the back of a medicine bottle. Maybe she did! I mean, what the fuck was she talking about? And what on earth did she make of her incomprehensible script? It’s like fanfic or something. It’s actually hard to believe Gilroy wrote the first three. Not without some heavy re-writing by invisible hands.
All this gubbins about mind-altering pills, designer drugs and chromosome-mutating viruses strays dangerously close to early Cronenberg, if not Marvel Comics territory. There’s also a ham-fisted theme of culpability buried in there somewhere. Rachel Weisz seems to represent the guys who built The Bomb. Or arms manufacturers. Guns don’t kill people, sledgehammer unsubtlty does. But J. Robert Oppenheimer should rest in peace – the blood on his hands is nothing compared to this!
Scott Glenn (old) cameos again, swapping thudding exposition with Stacy Keach (grim, Ben Grimm): “We gave you a Ferari and you treated it like a lawnmower.” Albert Finney (tired) cameos too. I think. I’m not sure, I may have blinked. (Overall, there was some very uninspired casting here. What? Zeljko Ivanec’s a bad guy? Who’d have thunk? I never saw that coming!)
Last minute cameos from David Strathairn and Joan Allen are a further reminder of what’s been sadly lacking while unforgivably rendering the conclusive-ish ending of The Bourne Ultimatum not nearly as final in retrospect as it seemed at the time, effectively undotting “i”s and uncrossing “t”s in the clumsiest way possible while threatening to drag this thing out indefinitely. “Treadstone’s just the tip of the iceberg.” Uh-oh. And I thought the hitherto unhinted-at romantic history cooked-up between Damon and Stiles in The Bourne Ultimatum was a plot contrivance too far.
So how far does this conspiracy reach? And how deep does the rabbit hole go? Or is it now a bottomless pit at the centre of a neverending labyrinth? A franchise which admirably had achieved closure of sorts is now potentially endless. Oh goody. And what’s this? Aggravated suicide now? If the Bourne franchise gets any more paranoid it’ll be implicating the audience next. We are talking internet levels of paranoia here!
“There was never just one,” ran the uninspired tagline. Oh lummy! That sounds more like a threat than a promise. What’s next? The Stath in The Bourne Travesty? Bourne is AWOL and this franchise is FUBAR. So if anyone offers you any more Bourne sequels, just say no! And there was me quietly hoping this would be the dark horse of the summer too. More like an oven-ready turkey I’m afraid. A dreary experience, frankly. The Boring Legacy, more like. Shame.
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RE: Empire wrote "SUMMER'S SMARTEST SEQUEL"... - 
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