BORING Legacy

Rating: 2/10 (21 December 2012)

This movie is a mess, it's convoluted, it attempts to be highly intelligent but fails miserably. Nearly every scene has either medical jargon or CIA/intelligent community lexicon in it, but... after the first 15 minutes of the movie, you no longer care whether you actually understand the lingo they're using or not. Phrases such as "She's going to try to viral him out"... pulleeeease. Every frickin' scene has rubbish in it like this. I guess that's Tony Gilroy's attempt to show how smart he is, and we're SUPPOSED to think, "Cool, I've never heard this before." But instead of being successful with this, Heir Director & Screenwriter only succeed in making us roll our eyes during every scene.
I think one of the problems, I regret to say, is what I call the curse of the Director who also wrote the script. Far too often, the Director who gets to direct his own script is far too enamored with his/her own words, that they have no perspective on telling the story. Because in this film, there really is no story.
And perhaps because of his past success with the first 3 Bourne scripts, and his success with writing/directing "Michael Clayton," the studio gave him free reign. But this was a mistake for this film. (Universal almost always ranks at the bottom of the 6 studios every year for Box Office grosses... clearly, the execs at this studio don't know how to oversee the creation and execution of good scripts. Of course, this could be said for all the studios. But when the studios at the top of the leader board earn twice what Universal does, clearly the folks at Universal have their heads up their butts.)
Back to "Boring Legacy." The other problems here -- and I simply don't understand it, because Jeremy Renner has shown charisma in his other work -- but he is just plain boring here. Flat and uninteresting. What happened? Is playing a troubled hero not in his bag of skills? Or is Tony Gilroy's direction so horrible that he messed up Renner? Rachel Weisz shows some spark here, but her dialogue is so horrible, that she's stuck with trying to make us believe it. All the other actors in this film, including the stars, are also flat as hell. NO ONE is really interesting in this film. Jesus.
Acting: D-
Set Pieces (action sequences): D-
Directing: F
Screenplay: F
Dialogue: F
Production: D
My last complaint. We travel to a bunch of cities, but the tone, the color timing, everything about the photography was also flat and boring. For some films, this *might* be appropriate. For this film, it only makes the whole experience of viewing it much worse.
The shame of all this? The first 2 Bourne movies were excellent. The 3rd one, decent. "Boring Legacy" however has tainted the franchise for me, and please God, don't let Universal make another one. Unless it's got Damon starring in it, AND someone else other than Gilroy directing.
And that's telling, actually. Damon refused to do a 4th Bourne film with Gilroy directing. I wonder why.