The Bourne Legacy is the 4th film of the 'Bourne' sequence, but with Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) being replaced by Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner- Avengers Assemble, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol). It also features Rachel Weisz, his female sidekick, and Edward Norton (no relation to Graham, although equally square- headed- maybe that's a 'Norton' thing).
It takes a while to get going in my opinion, there's not really any proper action until about 30- 40 minutes in. It's not a poor start, it's a decent, intruiging start to a movie but to be really good and to get you more hooked it should've had more action at the start of the film, maybe a car chase and a gun fight. I don't think the story is strong enough, it's too similar to The Bourne Identity but slightly weaker. Having said that, it's entertaining and I prefer Jeremy Renner to Matt Damon as the lead, he has much more personality to him. I think the main weakness of the first three Bourne films is that Bourne himself is a bit too dour and robotic in that he doesn't seem to have an ounce of humour in him and seems to act more like a machine than a man, he's a tad too miserable. I suppose it's understandable given his character's situation but he could still be made to have more personality in my opinion, just to give it that extra bit of quality.
Back to Legacy though, Rachel Weisz is the best Bourne girl so far. I know there haven't been many but she was an excellent companion to Renner. Her beauty, style and determined exterior made her a perfect fit for this type of film.
It got better as it went along. The action increased and the amount of scenes with Renner and Weisz in them increased and as that happened, the film got better. I wasn't too keen on the baddies, the people trying to track them down- led by old square head. His character was a bit of a pratt, not to get too technical about it. It was hard to take him seriously as an authortative character as he strikes you more as a nerdy character rather than a boss in some American intelligence agency.
A disadvantage of it was that I felt it went on a bit too long as if it had been intentionally padded out for the sake of it when it could have been more concise and effective as an entertaining, action- packed thrill ride. It does take too long to get going, if you were watching this at the cinema it probably wouldn't matter if you were 40 minutes late (not including the immense amount of time used up by adverts and previews).
Overall it's a good film and in terms of ranking over the four films I'd say it's probably 2nd behind Bourne Ultimatum. It could be first or 3rd though, it's pretty tight. It would be a clear first because of the main 2 characters being far better than the lead characters in any of the other films but for the slow start it makes, the lack of a really good storyline and the fact that Rachel Weisz isn't in it much at all in the first 45 minutes. But it was a very good watch, it's hard to go wrng with an action film and I'll probably watch it again before the year's out.
7/10.
(Image sources: http://cdn.mos.totalfilm.com/images/t/the-bourne-legacy-03-470-75.jpg http://0.tqn.com/d/movies/1/0/I/8/Z/bourne-legacy-rachel-weisz.jpg)
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