From the opening shot of a man swimming in the water to the closing sounds of the franchise’s signature song, Moby’s 'Extreme Ways', THE BOURNE LEGACY feels like a Bourne movie in every way – with one exception. No Matt Damon, which means his memory-addled CIA killing machine Jason Bourne is absent. So how do you make a Bourne movie without Bourne?

Writer and director Tony Gilroy, who penned all three previous episodes, has come up with an elegant solution that manages to widen out the story without feeling like a Hollywood cash-in. Rewinding to last episode, The Bourne Ultimatum, Gilroy’s script weaves a new story around old events and characters.

With Bourne still on the loose, the CIA brass (led by Edward Norton’s newcomer Byer) sets out to shut down the intense programme that he was the guinea pig for, ruthlessly terminating all agent trainees. Only one escapes – Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), who narrowly avoids death-by-missile in the Alaskan wilderness before going on the run with Rachel Weisz’s scientist, another CIA target.

For his first Bourne directorial assignment, Gilroy marshals the action impressively, particularly a motorbike chase across Manila that’s every bit as thrilling as Ultimatum’s one in Tangier. And in Renner, he has the perfect star. Like a modern-day Steve McQueen, one of many jaw-dropping stunts Renner takes on sees him run up the side of a house – Spider-Man eat your heart out.

If there’s a problem with the film, it’s that unlike the amnesiac Bourne, Cross knows exactly who he is and why he joined up (in one flashback, Byer tells him he’s a 'sin-eater', there to suck up all the bad stuff so we don’t have to) – which does fatally remove the mystery that drove the original trilogy. In the end, THE BOURNE LEGACY is a survival story, albeit a sleek and sophisticated one.


The List
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Who's better, Bond or Bourne? It's a question that's been posed ever since Matt Damon first started pegging it over rooftops in “The Bourne Identity” just over a decade ago. While Bond may have his wit, his gadgets, his charm and his Walther PPK, Bourne had Olympic-level running-away skills and was very, very good at forgetting stuff.

Damon isn't even in THE BOURNE LEGACY but newcomer Jeremy Renner (starring as “Not-Bourne”) is revealed as a genetically modified update on the old Operation Treadstone model. In other words, he's a superhero of sorts, a fact he duly shows off by pegging it over rooftops in grand fashion.

Not that I'm complaining: if Universal studios want to turn the Bourne series into a fantasy-tinged cautionary tale of test tube misadventure, all power to them. But wasn't this series supposed to be the gritty, brutally topical antidote to Bond's suave and fancy 60s-influenced take on the world of secret service operatives? Then again, perhaps I'm being naive and the CIA really are stealing ideas from the pages of 2000 AD in their ongoing battle against terrorism.

At least we can finally be certain that Bourne's souped-up successor would have wiped the floor with 007, even at some cost to the saga's integrity. For all his panache and swagger, Bond was never able to boast even a single genetically altered chromosome. “Not-Bourne” has three!

This time the action is based in The Phillipines, Canada and New York, regulars Albert Finney (Dr Albert Hirsch) and Joan Allen (Pam Landy) are back and the baddie is played by Edward Norton.


UK Guardian
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