Fun but flawed...it'll do until something better comes along

Rating: 6/10 (15 December 2012)

I come to this film as a huge, huge fan of the Bourne trilogy. They're films I can watch over and over again, enjoying them repeatedly each time. So I was eager to see how this spin-off worked out, given that Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon have chosen not to return to the fold at this time.
The worst thing about the film is Tony Gilroy, who returns to the franchise having been a writer on it for a long time. Here he directs as well, but he's no Greengrass, and it's pretty obvious most of the time that this is a piece of emulation. Lots of the scenes recall other, better moments from earlier films. It's almost as if Gilroy is looking back nostalgically on what worked in the past, hoping that he can repeat the same success here.
He can't, although THE BOURNE LEGACY remains a fitfully entertaining movie. The action sequences, when they come, are very well handled and almost on par with those of the original trilogy; a showdown in a house is a highlight, and the lengthy motorbike chase at the climax is brilliantly conceived. But, at a two-hour-plus running time, there's actually very little action, and genuine problems with slow pacing. Some of the time I was looking at my watch, waiting for something to happen.
Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz (whom I usually dislike) are blameless, both turning in decent, character-focused performances, and when stuff's happening the film gets really good. But it's all the extraneous stuff that drags it down: the repetitive attempts to tie things into the same timeline as the Bourne saga. Edward Norton's villain is pointless, and scenes with returning actors David Strathairn, Joan Allen and Scott Glenn are completely irrelevant. If they'd excised everything like that, focused it down entirely on Aaron Cross, brought the motorbike chase forward to the hour mark and given the film a genuine climax with Norton, it would have been much better and possibly on level with the earlier films. As it stands it's fun but flawed, certainly the worst of the four but still better than most of the DVD action trash I watch