November Blind Spot Review: The Bourne Legacy (2012)

“Well, if you’re going to reprogram human genetic material, you need a delivery system, and nothing works better than virus. It’s like a suitcase.”
– Dr Marta Shearing

SYNOPSIS: Aaron Cross, a new hero, experiences life-or-death stakes that have been triggered by previous events. – via IMDB

Okay, there we have it. I have finally watched this. After putting it off for so long. Like, forever, because you can’t stamp “Bourne” over something but discard of Matt Damon. Honestly, that’s how I feel. Well, watching this I could think only that this isn’t necessarily a bad movie at all, it just suffers heavily from being cast under the Bourne banner. The movie spent a lot of time establishing that this was going down concurrently with The Bourne Ultimatum, though at a later stage it flicks to Jason escaping, again, Pam Landy being in a lot of trouble, and this story continuing independently. Which would be fine, except what this story was relying on was probably one of the thinnest thread in movie history. Like, really. There is so much potential here, and they got the meat of it down, just the implementation of it was messy. Jeremy Renner’s Aaron Cross was definitely not like Bourne. Well, trained, maybe, and sporting a great jacket, but aside from that? Totally different. Maybe that has to do with the fact that the original Cross, who was in actual fact Kenneth James Kitsom, was a little bit slower than your average person. Not saying this offensively, he just comes across as more caring, softer. He was emotional. Yes, he will do what it takes to get away and all that, but Marie was initially a necessity for Jason, and that grew into something. I suppose the same could be argued for Cross and Marta Shearing, but it really isn’t the same. The logic didn’t quite follow as cleanly in this installment to the Bourne franchise. Case in point? When the “psychiatrist” started yelling, Marta should have realised something was amiss. One thing that really was super sad for me was seeing Kitsom before he became Cross. It was depressing and sad, and raised a whole bunch of other questions for me. Such as, if he was 12 points shy of the minimum requirement for the US Army, surely that means that he is not legally allowed to consent to them experimenting on him? I mean, if he cannot legally join the military, surely he cannot legally tell them to create a super soldier out of him? Just saying. Interesting avenue to explore right there. I found Cross to be quite endearing towards Marta, and Weisz and Renner worked well together. Renner was a great Cross, and I enjoyed his character quite a bit. There is potential to work with there. I think the biggest downfall of this is that Cross’s story feels like it was shoved in between Bourne’s stuff, to introduce him, but it was done sloppily, and his whole story was a giant thing of survive and get the drugs. No more, no less. I felt as if the exhilaration of the previous three films was missing here. Yeah, action involved for sure, but nothing that really thrills. Small gripe from me, too, is that there were times were there were very awkward attempts at subtle humour. As I said, not necessarily an awful film, it’s just not really a Bourne film. I suppose, like The Godfather: Part III, if you look at it as something that does not belong to the canon, then it isn’t as bad as people make it out to be. But if you compare it to its namesake, it will fall quite short of the mark.