REVIEW: The Bourne Legacy

It's nothing short of infuriating that Hollywood refuses to let its property go out on a high, or even let it die. If they aren't selling unimaginative films with a number on the end then they'll be desperately searching for an old franchise to dig up and reanimate in the form of a reboot – see The Amazing Spider Man or the new Total Recall reboot out later this month. Admittedly, sometimes this has worked out for the best (Christopher Nolan was nothing short of a saviour to the dying Batman franchise) but more often than not it is totally pointless.

In many ways, The Bourne Legacy feels like a reboot. Following the excellent trilogy of adaptations of Robert Ludlum's books, the latter two directed by Paul Greengrass and all three starring Matt Damon, it was expected that the series would remain finished, going out on the high of The Bourne Ultimatum. Not so. The key players of the franchise have been dropped – Greengrass and Damon are out – and some fresh meat been brought in – Jeremy Renner takes the main role, Rachel Weisz is the obligatory love interest, and Edward Norton is the new government baddie. On reputation alone, it seems as if the movie could work – the main actors are good, it looks to be a solid (if unnecessary) addition to the canon, and if all goes well could spawn a new trilogy. Not thrilling news, but not overwhelmingly bad either.

Yet somehow, it doesn't quite fulfil expectations, and to some extent feels like it belongs to a totally different franchise. To begin with, the film starts off by making no sense, and continues to be that way for a good half-an-hour/forty-five minutes before any hint of a plot begins to kick in. It does that thing that most Hollywood sequels do, in that it expects you to have complete knowledge of all events in the canon that precede it, down to the detail of names, places and events. Do you know how long ago the last Bourne movie was? 2007. I hate it when this happens, as they expect you to have watched the movie's predecessor the night before, which I simply refuse to do. A 'previously' would suffice. But anyway, as characters name dropped organisations, people etc. I had no clue whatsoever what was happening – and why I should care.

What I gathered is this – the CIA (or some shady government agency) has decided to pull the plug on a program of agents following the monumental cock-up that was Jason Bourne. The best way to go about doing this is – you guessed it – to kill off all their agents through some drug which gives the world's worst nosebleed. I wonder who thought this was a great idea. "Hey", someone said at a meeting, "we don't want those guys going around getting information and killing people and – you know – doing their job anymore, so instead of, say, offering them a generous pension and severance package, we should kill them all!" "Don't you think that's not a great idea” said someone else, “what with them being powerful trained killers who have proven themselves to be able to kill anyone else in the world at the drop of a hat?" Whereupon he was promptly escorted from the room for being a sane individual. I think it would be nice to give trained assassins a chance to turn their life around – who knows, under the right circumstances they could become care workers or go and build houses for starving African children. But no, they have to kill them, and as Renner's character avoids death by ballistic missile, he goes on the run to wean himself off some kind of mind-control job and to get revenge on those who betrayed him and – I don't know, start a cocktail bar on the coast of Barbados.

If I sound somewhat indifferent about this movie it's because I am. While the action sequences are serviceable, the characters presented here are so mind-numbingly boring and unvaried from what we've seen before it's hard to care about any of them. Edward Norton's character is given little else to do but bark at his colleagues and it seems Rachel Weisz's sole role is to act unstable and nervous all the time – a perfectly normal reaction to the violent events happening around her, but it does make her feel bland and somewhat like a tool. And as much as I liked Renner in The Hurt Locker and The Town I feel as if he can't fill the gap left by Matt Damon – you know, Jason goddamn Bourne, the character the franchise is all about – and I would personally be surprised if a movie as dull as this would spawn any sequels. Oh wait, it performed well at the box office, so I guess we'll be seeing The Bourne Legacy II: Electric Boogaloo sometime next year.

★★

FILM4 REVIEW: Paprika

This summer, I've become oddly obsessed with Japanese cult films. Not only have I watched Battle Royale and the majority of Studio Ghibli's works (which I must say are still as brilliant and mesmerizing as I remember them), but I most recently watched Paprika, a Japanimation about a machine that can enter people's dreams. The machine is stolen by a terrorist and the scientists who devised the machine must set about tracking the culprit down before they cause chaos.

Needless to say, it's a surreal affair. The Japanese are somewhat notorious for taking off on flights of fancy when creating these types of films, but in this case it fits. Dreams are known to go in odd directions, as our subconscious has no boundaries when exploring our vast imagination, and when expressing this through the medium of film it's clear than animation is best way to go about this. The dream sequences are often spectacular, as the animation on display here is, at its best, absolutely breath taking.

And despite its subject matter, the plot is surprisingly easy to follow, despite occasional surreal asides so typical of this type of film. The main character, played by Megumi Hayashibara, is a psychiatrist-turned-scientist, who wants to use the dream machine – called the D.C. Mini – to treat her patients by examining their subconscious. However, when she ventures into dreams (and this is where it gets a little complicated) she uses another personality called 'Paprika', who is her diametric opposite – while she is very cold and professional, Paprika is the embodiment of passion and life.

If presented differently, this could be a very hard to follow story element; yet in this film, everything makes a twisted kind of sense. Satoshi Kon, the director, grounds his dream sequences with a kind reality, and this is when the film is at its strongest. He also fleshes out the characters on display here substantially, giving those who could be lazily assigned to a stereotypical supporting role real importance – for instance, the abnormally fat creator of the D.C. Mini evolves from being a comedic sidekick into a character important to the narrative (not something seen frequently in Hollywood). And while the film loses its way somewhat towards the end – the viewer gets lost in a frenzy of bizarre imagery – it is still strong for its combination of fantasy, character development and, to a certain extent, mystery (the search for the terrorist is compelling throughout).

It's no wonder, then, that Christopher Nolan stated that this film was his inspiration for Inception. The parallels between the two films are clear – both explore how the line between dreams and reality begin to blur (Paprika explores this far more literally) and both explore the danger of living a different life within dreams, and how this can damage one's subconscious.

Admittedly, Paprika is sometimes a little too strange for its own good, and it's also somewhat irritating that it sometimes becomes clichéd in a Japanese way (yes, a young girl gets attacked by tentacles). However, it's still a good film, both compelling and imaginative, and is well worth a look. Just remember your totem.

★★★½