Probably my favorite pure spy flick even if I liked it less than Ultimatum. The universe has become scenery by now and might be an afterthought if it weren't interesting and inventive. Unlike Damon's Bourne it doesn't depend for suspense on unfolding his story or challenging your expectations. It's almost my favorite extended TV episode of all time: it seems like everything I've seen, and everything of it that's somehow new. I thought it would be occasionally dull and generally acceptable. It's effortless every moment and perfectly ordinary.

8.3/10

The beginning and very end were bad, but everything else was solid. Although it takes awhile for the action to kick in it's worth the wait. *SPOILERS*I don't understand why they needed that asian superBourne at the end. Wouldn't he have been among the agents terminated earlier in the movie? And he really didn't do anything that the cops couldn't have done.

Anyways I give it a B for having more good than bad. I hope they have a Damon/Renner team up in the future.

BOURNE LEGACY

I enjoyed the film. I thought it was a nice continuation of this series. A new beginning with Renner as lead yet connecting it with the previous film. I actually liked most of the film and thought it was quite intense at parts. I didn't find the first 20 minutes slow at all. I liked the introduction to AC. I thought the action sequence at the doctor's house and the mass shooting were both very well done. The shooting was very intense. The film though got a bit bogged down during the whole chase/catchup even though I enjoyed the step by step research and video camera pulling as they investigated where the doctor went but that whole chase scene on the bikes and the other special ops guy was just a bit long and in terms of the agent that falls under a "why was he needed in the first place category". It was a mellow ending as well which is nice for a sequel but I think something more cliffhangerish would have been more appropriate.

Grade - B

The first hour feels like it's at least three, and there's absolutely no emotional hook to the story.

Other than that, it's fine. Renner and Weisz work. Some nice action scenes. Edward Norton is fun as the baddie. Certainly the worst of the four, and probably not worth a $12 movie ticket, but it's a nice rental.

It basically bends over backwards to try and connect to the original trilogy, and it doesn't really work. The cutting back-and-forth between the Renner stuff and the Treadstone/Blackbriar/whatever stuff at the beginning is pretty bad, and totally kills any sense of flow. Once the film settles on Renner it gets into a groove, but it ultimately ends pretty anti-climactically with an obvious sequel set-up. The film almost feels inconsequential, and takes far too long to get into the swing of things. And the blue + green pill/genetic mutation stuff was pretty ridiculous, bordering on sci-fi nonsense.

Definitely the worst of the series, but it's not a total waste. The action's generally good, Renner is charismatic, and it doesn't pander to its audience. But it's far too convoluted for a summer blockbuster.

It's as if Tony Gilroy was hellbent on taking the fun out of this series. It's far from a complete disaster thanks to Renner, Weisz, and those final 20 minutes, but holy hell is it a slog to get through. Gilroy really overestimated how much he thought the audience would give a shit about the story. No one goes to see these movies for the story first. It was just an added bonus they happened to be interesting and not very convoluted. They were great entertainment. The Bourne Legacy is anything but that.

** (C)

I liked it. It was good, but not much more. It didn't helped watching the first three right before this one, though. Renner is good in the part but he's definately no Matt Damon, who was just perfect for the Bourne part. My biggest complaint is probably that it's just way less exciting than the other ones. B

No review from David? I usually really like his reviews and I want to know what he liked soo much about this one.

By the end of Tony Gilroy's unbearably long and talky The Bourne Legacy, one is left feeling as though the film hasn't even started yet. Nothing happens in it, and the only thing it inspires is anticipation: it's all first act; all supplementary material; all self-importance and hot air. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) sits this one out while another similar soldier, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), occupies a space parallel to the first three films, climbing mountains, Grey-ing wolves, and saving hot virologist Dr. Marta (Rachel Weisz) from the clutches of our evil government so that she can infect him with a virus that makes him smart. This leads to a moment, inevitable, where Cross suggests that losing 12 points off his artificially-inflated IQ would result in some personal "Flowers for Algernon" apocalypse where 12 points would probably result in him forgetting his phone number at worst. It also leads to a series of incoherent flashbacks that fit in perfectly with Gilroy's impossible-to-follow action sequences; if you're just going to turn a camera on and throw it out a window, why bother trying to set it up? For those keeping score, there are more spinning Lazy Susan shots here than in Transformers: Asshole. You've been warned.

There's nothing more to the story than Aaron wanting to stay smart and the CIA--with head-spook/analyst Byer (Ed Norton, thisclose to swallowing himself whole like some Ouroborosian worm) in the lead--wanting to see him dead. Why they want him and his buddies dead isn't exactly clear, particularly if we remember the activation of other agents to catch Jason in the previous films, and hardly explained away by the appearance in this one of some genetic superfreak (Louis Ozawa Changchein)--the Kraken released and summarily dispatched in the most disappointing climax of the year. Shot in extreme close-up with no sense of space or consequence, none of the action in the picture is comprehensible. None of the exposition is comprehensible, either, alternating as it does between megalomaniacal paranoia and bad smart/dumb science-speak that drones on and on. If not for the peculiar ability of Weisz to lend pathos to a phone-book reading, I would have dropped off any number of times.

Her wounded, desperate quality, in fact, fuels the film's only affecting set-piece: a workplace shooting that feels too near to recent events in the United States, startling for its cleanness and brutality. It's an interesting thing when the most stimulating scene of violence in a Bourne movie doesn't include the star or do much to advance the narrative, though Gilroy tries to disguise this with reams of punishing technobabble. Whenever Cross isn't jumping around on cliffs or buildings, in fact, The Bourne Legacy is running lines on shaky-cam that we're supposed to care about as much as the characters do. (If you do happen to give a shit about a 1.5% increase in mitochondrial stimulation, man, have I got the movie for you.) A centrepiece sequence in which our intelligence community tracks Cross and Marta from a burning house to an airport to Manila is the quintessence of the picture's tediousness, demonstrating that Gilroy's fine so long as someone else is directing and, obviously, reshaping his screenplays.

What worked about the Bourne saga until now was Damon's everyman surprise to discover that he's maybe a replicant, implanted with memories and superhuman in many ways. His quest begins as existential and ends as fatalistic; something about the idea that the quest for God always ends in an acceptance of chaos really appeals to me. What kills The Bourne Legacy, beyond its complete technical failure, is that its hero doesn't wonder what he is (he's Martin Riggs) and wants to keep being what he is while avoiding the U.S. military-industrial complex and maybe gaining an extremely attractive doctor girlfriend in the process. Manila is portrayed as a sweaty throng, Bethesda is portrayed as a frigid wasteland, and the action is so genuinely godawful that you begin to dread the next bout. It's abusive, actually--movie-by-sledgehammer, and the bulk of it is spent in a fugue state wondering whether Jason Bourne is going to make a cameo and whether Paddy Considine came back to recreate his walking-on-a-street scene from the second sequel or they cobbled this crap together from outtakes like a Jim Wynorski flick. The Bourne Legacy is a real shame--not merely the worst entry in a series I've liked until now, but also one of the worst movies of the year.

The Bourne Legacy

Not what I was expecting, and Jeremy Renner is actually rather likeable. Much more likeable than in The Avengers, that's for sure. This fourth chapter in the Bourne series has more of a Hollywood sheen than its predecessors, which were a little more grainy and rough around the edges (which I liked) than this one. The shakey-cam fights and action chases are still there in this one, though it doesn't seem as annoying as the previous movies, unless I'm just used to it by now.

What I really liked about this one, and I was dreading this wasn't going to be the case, was how this movies' timeline parallels The Bourne Ultimatum, and it ties the entire Treadstone, Blackbriars and Larx organisations into the Bourne world that we already know. It shows and refers to Jason Bourne several times, and it even shows that reporter for The Guardian newspaper getting shot so that we know it's tied in. It felt like part of the franchise, and that was really important for me.

The action was great, especially the motor bike chases' culmination and the three Fillipino security guards that Renner takes out. The house scene was very good too, as was the snowy mountain action scenes, but I did feel slightly near the end that there wasn't enough action in this, and after the motorbike scene I expected another big finale, so I was slightly underwhelmed to find that the motorbike chase was it.

At first I thought that Weisz wasn't as good as the previous women in the Bourne franchise, but she did grow on me. Not sure if she was doing a weird US accent or whether because she's been in the US for a long time that it's just rubbed off on her. Finney, Joan Allen, Strathairn, they're all still there. The only part I disliked was the ending on the boat. The music comes on after a silly last line which was meant to be clever, but it just fell flat. It was the happily ever after scene that shouldn't have been there. I guess, for all the originality in Hollywood, that if they made another one that Weisz would die by getting shot in the back of the head during an escape in a 4x4, and Renner would be angry and want vengeance. The ending could have been planned better.

This is not the dud that I thought it would be. I also felt that this one was so much more easy to follow than the previous three. I want to see more from Bourne and Cross together now.

B+

Saw this last night, there were surprisingly a lot of parallels between this and the Dorner story in the news

I really enjoyed this. Renner was good just as I knew he would be. What surprised me though was I thought the chemistry between him and Rachel Weisz was really good too.

B+

I am glad you enjoyed it. This is such an undervalued film. It is an exciting and highly worthy continuation of the franchise.

The connections to the original trilogy don't all work, but as a standalone film it is quite strong. Renner adds a new light to the franchise that is enjoyable to grasp on to and him along with Weisz are fun to watch. I'll gladly welcome a fifth film in this franchise.

The continuous insistence to tie to Bourne series is what brings this down, without those connections its good albeit starts a tad slower with nothing much to add but once it kicks in and Weisz comes into play it becomes something different entirely. The finale is also great and Renner was a great choice for this. Still for a Bourne series I think this was easily the weakest of the lot.