A good action movie, but not deserving of the Bourne name.

Rating: 7/10 (21 August 2012)

Immediate questions surround the Bourne Legacy. Will the action match up to the original trilogy's? Can Jeremy Renner's Aaron Cross match Matt Damon's Jason Bourne? The answer- no. The Bourne Legacy is an above average action movie, but it's not worthy of the Bourne series.
Several things critical to the Bourne atmosphere were absent. The classic Bourne soundtrack by John Powell has been foolishly removed, and along with it, the breathtaking suspense present in the originals. It was like Star Wars without John Williams. Aaron Cross was a good action movie star; however, Matt Damon is Matt Damon-his outfit, his personality, and his bearing were made to be in the world of Bourne. Aaron Cross with his more contemporary look felt out of place. He felt almost as if he wanted to be Jason Bourne, but couldn't quite make it happen. Aaron Cross was just not as cool, unable to match Bourne's ability to completely control a situation as he did in scenes such as Waterloo Station.
But now that we have those questions out of the way, we can get to the real point. The Bourne Legacy standing alone. The following is a review that is hopefully void of comparisons to the original- as it should be written.
As I stated earlier, The Bourne Legacy is an above average action movie, and manages to avoid most of the action movie clichés. Jeremy Renner does a good job of breaking out of the mold of the flat action hero, and also avoids cheesy line deliveries, resulting in an overall interesting action hero. Rachel Weisz does a decent job as a supporting cast member; however, while being interrogated, her dialogue broke down into panicked babbling that dragged a little long.
The story felt different than the average action movie, adding depth to a genre dominated by kiddy pool deep narratives. On the contrary, this does not exempt it from my criticism. Saying that it is better than the average action movie script, in reality doesn't mean much. It still makes many mistakes and is below average as a film script. The Bourne Legacy tried to hard in the beginning to gain its depth, resulting in me sitting through scene after scene not knowing what their meaning was until finally, about two-thirds of the way through, some of it was explained. The writers spent too much time establishing the premise of the film that questions just backed up like a traffic jam; there were too many ideas to sift through. And at the end of the day, the movie ended, and left many of the ideas stranded on the freeway, no doubt for an inevitable sequel.
The action was the redeeming factor in this movie. Aaron Cross's ingenuity during combat (using a fire hydrant as a gun, etc.) was refreshing after watching hours and hours of movies with people using guns ('cause that's just boring). All joking aside, The Bourne Legacy achieved what many action movies see as impossible. It was somewhat realistic. There was no magic bullet dodging-Aaron Cross used his quickness to evade his attackers line of fire, rather than diving into the open guns blazing (I'm talking about you Bond!), and occasionally, he would get shot too. The action scenes did have an occasional blunder, such as Aaron Cross and his opponent putting on sunglasses like they were high-rollers getting out of a car, and then zooming off on a chase scene. I suppose if you're going to get in a car accident, you might as well look cool while doing it.
The Bourne Legacy is a good action movie. I am a huge fan of originality, and the Bourne Legacy was able to capture that kind of feel. It didn't however, achieve the Bourne atmosphere; moreover, Jeremy Renner can't hold a torch up to Matt Damon. In fact, I believe this movie should have been its own. The Bourne Legacy had almost all the components of a separate movie, but for whatever reason kept the small connection. Unfortunately, the Bourne Legacy had a careless ending, which damaged the Bourne Ultimatum's ending (can't say why, no spoilers). The Bourne Legacy was an average, refreshing action movie, but it shouldn't have been Bourne.