Good lead actors, poor plot and direction.

Rating: 1/10 (21 September 2012)

Granted this is coming from someone who has never read the Bourne novels at all, but nothing about this movie screams "Bourne" to me.
I saw the trailers (just about all of them), I thought maybe it will be OK, I was hesitant because I did not recognise most of the actors in the cast from the previous films. Off to the movies I go, and well, I was looking for the remote with the fast forward button the entire way through.
You have to commend Jeremy Renner, Edward Norton and Rachel Weisz for what they were able to pull off with this film script. But for me the film did not have more than 1 out of 5 elements that I feel makes a Bourne film.
-Barely a mention of Bourne; -The government always seemed to have the upper hand in the hunt for the "agent" (less than 2 minutes of dialogue to catch up a 17 hour head start by these "super agents"); -The agent never once (in the Australian version) made the government officials look like fools by casually letting them know he is watching them while they are scratching their heads trying to find him (despite what the trailer had in it). In the second Bourne film that happened twice; In the 3rd film, he broke in to their HQ while they were out trying to catch him; -The is an agent, running away from the corrupted government entity;
I get that they have to add something to make the everyday normal agents come up to that of the Bourne Character from previous films (in this case the medication), but in this film not even the title of the makes any sense.
For me the word "legacy" means to hand down or pass on your knowledge so that a new character can continue your work, which in this story would be to continue to take down the corrupted government entities that keep springing up.
The the previous films Bourne seriously wounded several normal agents but never killed them, he even came up against an agent in the first film that said the following line "see what they make you give", Bourne also said this line to another agent that was trying to take him out i believe in the 3rd film. Any one of those characters could have been brought back in combination with Bourne teaching them how to be as good as he is and it would have been a Legacy. This film was called a Legacy, for me I guess the writers never looked up the meaning of the word in the Dictionary.