The Bourne Legacy

“Doc­tor, doc­tor, you’ve got to help me. It’s my uncle – he thinks he’s a chicken!”

“Well, bring him in, we’ll soon have him cured.”

“I would… but we need the eggs.”

Depend­ing on your tem­pera­ment, this side­long puz­zler is either a gob of con­trived silli­ness or a frac­tal-scarred feed­back loop of depen­dence and men­tal dis­or­der from which there is no log­i­cal escape. Both inter­pre­ta­tions also hap­pen to apply to this most­ly dis­mal and whol­ly inessen­tial Bourne hang­over that wants its audi­ence to trade-up their invest­ment in Matt Damon’s tit­u­lar action hero with­out ever lay­ing him to rest and promis­ing to get on with new business.

Indeed, there are aspects of the film so reliant on our hazy mem­o­ries of the labyrinthine intri­ca­cies of Damon’s swan­song, The Bourne Ulti­ma­tum, that only true adher­ents to the fran­chise will like­ly grasp the full sub­stance of Legacy’s plot. The rest will be forced to grab hold of any­thing they can and cling on for dear life.

Tak­ing place simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with the last act of Ulti­ma­tum, Tony Gilroy’s over-con­cep­tu­alised film has already put itself at some­thing of a dis­ad­van­tage. No-one was expect­ing a nod/​wink 007-style regen­er­a­tion of the Bourne char­ac­ter, but sure­ly it would have been a good idea to make more than a par­tial break with the pre­ced­ing trilogy?

Instead, the film takes one step for­ward and two steps back in intro­duc­ing us to Jere­my Renner’s Aaron Cross, an Out­come (read: Tread­stone; read: CIA) agent who shares not only Bourne’s ass-kick­ing skillset, but also has a face that looks like a (admit­ted­ly hand­some) par-boiled pork joint. Cross is labour­ing through a train­ing mis­sion in the Alaskan wilder­ness, the suc­cess of which relies upon him get­ting to his des­ti­na­tion in time to receive his lat­est dosage of some lit­tle blue and green pills that keep his spy brain inflat­ed and his mus­cles bulging.

But we’ll come back to those pills in a moment.

When the top brass back in Wash­ing­ton become skit­tish over the Bourne far­ra­go – or sim­ply because these films rely on lone, high­ly-resourced black-ops wet-job­bers get­ting back at shad­owy, cor­rupt Agen­cies like Gren­del sack­ing the Mead Hall – Cross is tar­get­ed for elim­i­na­tion by his high­er-ups and has to go under­ground in order to secure his super pills/​clear his name/​save an orphan­age – it doesn’t real­ly mat­ter, as long as there’s rote spy shit and dull, close-quar­ters ​‘elbow fight­ing’ every few minutes.

Soon Rachel Weisz’s jit­tery phar­ma­col­o­gist is in tow and the pair are off on an under­pow­ered jaunt through such recog­nis­able sit­u­a­tions and locales as a chill, ele­gant clap­board house in the boonies (Road to Perdi­tion), a clank­ing fac­to­ry assem­bly line (The Ter­mi­na­tor) and an under-revved motor­bike chase through misc Ori­en­tal slum­land (Tomor­row Nev­er Dies) while Edward Nor­ton, Sta­cy Keach and assort­ed pasty-faced Agency rhubarb-mer­chants bark into phones, stare at com­put­er mon­i­tors and take long, drea­ry meet­ings in an attempt to stop them.

Fair enough, you say: New Things don’t actu­al­ly exist any more. But Gilroy has failed to illu­mi­nate these famil­iar fea­tures in any new light. The result is a talky, con­fus­ing film that’s light on action and heavy on unnec­es­sary expo­si­tion. It feels less like a sleek, post‑9/​11 espi­onage thriller than the sort of quaint ​’60s pot­boil­er – The Quiller Mem­o­ran­dum, say, or The Oster­man Week­end – you might come across on after­noon TV when pulling a sickie.

Indeed, it’s a shame that cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Robert Elswit couldn’t muster up some of the verve and ener­gy he brought to Mis­sion Impos­si­ble: Ghost Pro­to­col – a spy film that, for all its faults, at least tried to shake some fresh fruit from the tree.

The Bourne Legacy’s strengths are, alas, few in num­ber. Ren­ner does his utmost, but even he doesn’t look like he knows exact­ly what’s going on. Mean­while, Weisz deliv­ers one of her go-to ​‘flus­tered Prim­rose Hill yum­my-mum­my in need of a gulp of Mer­lot’ per­for­mances, which irri­tates from the off. There’s one taut, com­pe­tent­ly staged shoot-out in a med-lab that you might hear raved about else­where, and it does at least grab the atten­tion, but if you’ve ever seen Juras­sic Park/​Aliens/​an episode of Spooks then it’s unlike­ly you’ll get too excited.

And then there’s those pills.

To its cred­it, the film treads very light­ly when it comes to the crumbly lit­tle tablets that ramp up Renner’s brains and biceps, but that can’t quite dis­guise the orig­i­nal, bone­head­ed idea to sad­dle the lead char­ac­ter with a ridicu­lous, juve­nile video game pow­er-up that, when you take a moment to con­sid­er it, risks pitch­ing the film in amongst the likes of Crank, Speed, Uni­ver­sal Sol­dier and any num­ber of dubi­ous, low-rent clock-tickers.