- I'll give them this: the creative team behind the Bourne movies has a healthy respect for continuity. In fact, Tony Gilroy's The Bourne Legacy is so fully interwoven with the other Bourne films that I almost regret not having rewatched them recently. The main characters in this film frequently allude to the escapades of superspy Jason Bourne, while characters who were important in the previous movies (Scott Glenn, David Strathairn, Joan Allen, Albert Finney) provide cameos just to tie everything together. It's almost enough to convince you that Jason Bourne really appears in this film, even if his presence is limited exclusively to name-dropping, a wood-carved signature, and a frequently deployed headshot of Matt Damon.
- Unfortunately, this dedication to the other Bourne films is much more impressive than The Bourne Legacy's actual plot, which involves training a new generation of chemically modified amnesiac superspies. Hey, if we've all seen the previous three movies, shouldn't we agree that this is a really lousy idea? Actually, the new generation of shadowy conspirators (Edward Norton and Stacy Keach) comes to the same conclusion and decides to exterminate their agents-in-training before they're discovered. In one of the film's best scenes, a military drone soars in to blow up anonymous agents Number Three (Oscar Isaac) and Number Five (Jeremy Renner) at a remote mountain cabin. Five survives the assassination attempt, but only by digging out the tracking implant out of his torso and feeding it to a hungry wolf. That sentence alone should convince you just how hardcore these guys really are.
- In the meantime, the film's other memorable scene depicts a terrifying murder spree at a chemical manufacturing plant in which the perpetrator (Ċ½eljko Ivanek) methodically stalks through the entire lab, killing his colleagues off without any trace of emotion. The only survivor, Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), is eventually rescued by Number Five, and the two swap stories about blue chems, green chems, and the likelihood that the lab murderer had been brainwashed by the government. From there on out, there's plenty of globetrotting, a little viral inoculation, and of course a confrontation with the newest model of superspy (Louis Ozawa Changchien). Seriously, government agencies, it is way past time that you stopped manufacturing new superspies.
- With all due respect to the truly excellent film The Bourne Identity and its literally and figuratively shaky sequels, I've grown a little tired of the subgenre these films helped launch. A new spy film needs to be about more than a brainwashed agent battling a shadow government, a story that has now been told seemingly hundreds of times. This film tries to incorporate a few real-life contemporary concerns by depicting such hotbutton subjects as drone surveillance and mass shootings, but it doesn't have anything new or intelligent to say about them. The most novel aspect of the film probably arrives through Dr. Shearing, who finally gives a voice to the nameless white-coated movie scientists who happily do questionable work for the government. She doesn't have anything like a sympathetic justification for her career, so at least the question of ethical culpability has been answered.
