The Bourne Legacy (2012)

  Rob and I had a date night on Friday and went to see this movie.  He had really enjoyed the previous three in the series.  I was less enthralled with Supremacy and Ultimatum because of the overuse of shaky-cam but I was willing to give this installment a shot since it was a different director and all.

Holy shit, was this a boring movie.  More like Stillborn Legacy, amirite?  No?  Too far?  Seriously, I almost fell asleep before it was over.  Jeremy Renner has grown on me as an actor since I first saw (and hated) him in S.W.A.T. but there was nothing he could do to save this film.  Unless this makes a boatload of money overseas, this will probably be the last Bourne.

Now, concept-wise, it was neat.  They basically set it alongside the first three movies as an ancillary piece, kind of a what-was-happening-elsewhere while the main character was doing his thing.  But to do that well you kind of have to make the ancillary story interesting, otherwise you might as well show people in New Jersey going about their daily lives while newscasts of Jason Bourne play in the background.

Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) was a participant in a government shadow project involving gene therapy called Outcome which was spun off of Treadstone, the shadowy government project that created Jason Bourne (Sir Not-Appearing in This Film).  After the lid is blown off Treadstone, the shadowy government guys, led by Eric Byer (Edward Norton), start trying to cover their asses by killing off all the Outcome agents.  Aaron doesn't want to die but he is also out of the meds he needs to stay sharp.  Solution?  Rescue the pretty virologist who used to do a bunch of medical tests on him.  Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz) was about to be liquidated when she is swept off to explain a whole bunch of the plot.  See, the second and third generations of Bourne knock-offs were enhanced by using viruses to manipulate their genes and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Sorry, passed out for a moment there.

I love movies based on science almost as much as I love action movies and I do believe you can have both science and action in a movie and it be great.  However, the ratio of it has to be more action than science and Bourne Legacy was on the wrong side of that equation.