Garbage

Rating: 3/10 (31 October 2012)

I went to see this film without having seen the previous Bourne movies. I had heard you wouldn't really need to have seen them to understand and enjoy this. Yes, I did understand the film, as it's fairly removed from the other movies, features mostly new characters and a simple plot.
There are some entertaining parts in this movie, like the scene in the manor. Jeremy Renner is always a good action hero, and the acting overall is actually quite good.
Did I enjoy the film? No.
I cannot remember seeing a movie in a theater and feeling both bored to death and physically ill at the same time. The constant shaky-cam and the weird, extreme closeup -fixated cinematography create a strange, almost nauseating mess of images that isn't terribly hard to follow, but most of the time feels completely pointless. Despite being over 2 hours long, the story feels like it cuts off about two thirds into itself, and is still terribly messy. The pacing is all over the place, and it gets an awful long time for the plot to actually get moving. The story moves from A to B to C without any sense of weight or meaning. The final big action scene seems to go on for ever and ever, and when it ends, it ends just as abruptly as the movie.
I'm actually having a hard time writing this review, because I can't recall much of any specific plot points or events, just a blurry haze. All in all, The Bourne Legacy felt like a missed opportunity to take an old action franchise into a new direction. I actually flipped the bird at the silver screen in frustration when the credits rolled. I felt like I had wasted a good 2 hours of my life.
Just your average whiz-bang-crunch-vroom -fest with nothing special or interesting about it.