Movie Review - The Bourne Legacy

What can one say about a movie like this? One the one hand, it seems to be competently acted and competently directed. The action scenes have a lot of action. The locales are exotic, from the mountains of Alaska (probably really Alberta), the high tech control rooms and Singapore. The plot actually makes sense, at least internally, which in a movie involving superhuman spies is the best you can hope for. At least it started to make sense after the first 30 minutes or so. On the other hand...

So what's the problem? The problem is that the movie is almost complete pointless. It seems to exist only as a bridge between the Matt Damon Bourne movies and hopefully some future Bourne movie which may re-capture the original Bourne movies excitement.

For me, most of what made the previous Bourne movies so good was that you cared for the Jason Bourne character. Either because of the story, the direction or Matt Damon, you cared. It was impossible to work up any emotion for Jeffery Remmer in this movie. He plays Aaron Cross (I had to look up the characters name on IMBD.com because I wasn't sure, I thought is name was Erin something). Cross is a super agent, made super by modern chemistry. He spends the first 30 minutes or so wondering around the wilds of supposed Alaska popping green and blue pills and taking blood samples.  Rachel Weisz is Dr. Marta Shearing and only someone who hasn't seen an action movie before won't know that despite Aaron being in the wilderness and Marta being in a glitzy sci-fi lab, they will get together.

Ed Norton is, well it hardly matters what his name is. He's heading a team looking into the Treadstone disaster. Although his team spends most of it's time looking at paper and giant computer monitors, and talking on the phone, they are all stone cold killers. Here's where this only makes sense from an internal standpoint.

Aaron and Marta manage to stay one step ahead of Ed as they head to Singapore to get Aaron meds. They should have gotten completely away except super intelligent Aaron slips up (maybe because the blue pills were wearing off). Watch for the scene where Marta gets eyeballed on an overhead TSA camera in an airport. All she needed was a floppy hat!

Anyway, they end up in a wild car/motorcycle chase in Singapore being chased by the police and yet another superspy born of chemistry (who doesn't have any moral scruples). We were expecting a big physical showdown between Aaron and this guy (Larx?) but that ended as disappointingly as the final confrontation between Batman and Bain.

And then... And then the movie just ends.

My prediction. The next sequel will be about Aaron (T-101) being chased around the world by another Larx character (T-1000). Aaron will win because humanity always wins out over gutless technology (at least in the movies).

In the sequel after than, they will finally figure out how much money they need to get Matt Damon back. Jason Bourne and Aaron Cross will team up and...sorry, my imagination (and interest0 fails me.

One final comment. Note Albert Finney's name in the credits on the poster. He has about 10 seconds of screen time in a grainy video.