The Bourne Legacy, the follow-up to the Bourne trilogy, has a muddled plot and will have you pulling your hair out trying to figure out what is going on, but if can manage to get through the first half of the movie without falling asleep, you may like it.
The movie starts out with a man running through the outback of the Alaskan wilderness who appears to be on drugs. He is jumping over cliffs, fighting off wolves, and taking some kind of performance enhancing pills. Who is he? He is Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), a super secret agent on a training mission. What is his mission? Don’t have a clue (and that is after watching the entire movie).
Here is what I think happened: The C.I.A., or some similar closeted agency led by Colonel Eric Beyer (Edward Norton), is using a group of their agents as guinea pigs for experimentation with genetically enhanced drugs. The Colonel fears some kind of media fallout based on a public disclosure from Jason Bourne (the last Bourne movie) and pulls the plug on what is known as program “Outcome” (by pulling the plug, I mean whacking all the unlucky participants of the gig). Somehow Cross survives and now he must find out who is trying to eliminate him. Cross is also dealing with a crisis of a sort: he has run out of pills and is now facing withdrawal (think crack addict). He gets back to Washington and hooks up with Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weiss), one of the doctors responsible for administering the drug and then there is a series of fight scenes, car chases, and of course, motorcycle stunts, as our heroes search for the withdrawal cure while being pursued by the spook agency.
If you have not seen the previous Bourne movies, which are based on books, I would suggest watching them in order to get some history, but you will still struggle trying to figure out what is going on. Appearances by Albert Finney, Stacy Keach, Joan Allen, and Scott Glenn, can’t save the movie. I know that we watch these movies to see the fight scenes, car chases, and motorcycle stunts: problem is they don’t kick in until the second half of the movie. By then you have been lost and will be looking for a refill on your popcorn.
My Rating: 2 out 5 hopped-up agents.
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