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.
★★
