Bourne-Lite

Rating: 5/10 (21 February 2013)

Hmmmm...I think I'm safe to say that this was a bit of a disappointment. I was looking forward to this when it was first announced, despite the slight inkling in the back of my mind that this will suck without the involvement of either Matt Damon or Paul Greengrass; I should've listened to that inkling. Not only does it lack the brains of the previous Bourne movies, it also lacks the brawn. The story is just a rehash of the basic premise of Identity; assassin goes in search of the people who have wronged him while trying to fill-in the gaps in his dodgy memory. Except this time, they added that horrendous twist about Jeremy Renner's Aaron Cross and his contemporaries being genetically modified, giving them their enhanced abilities; and they have to take these drugs to maintain these abilities. Aaron Cross needs his meds so he goes in search for them while government types are trying to terminate the program that made him what he is. So basically it's a movie about a drug addict looking for his next score! Renner does his best with what he's been given, while Weisz is unconvincing as the scientist who's trying to help him; the problem here is that they have no chemistry, so whenever they're on-screen together it feels really uncomfortable and awkward. Ed Norton's character is kinda pointless. The pace of the movie is a bit flabby, while the previous movies were lean, taut, concise and tense, with plenty of action to help the flow of the movies; Legacy doesn't have any of that. The action scenes are few and far between, even when there's action, they're really just uninspired retreads of what's gone before. I think I'll suddenly develop amnesia on this one and forget that this travesty ever happened.