The
original Bourne trilogy grew out of
Doug Liman’s smoothly orchestrated, fashionably reserved 2001 adaptation of Robert
Ludlum’s novel, and was expanded by Paul Greengrass into something less
traditional. The template was boilerplate spy adventuring, but charged with
elusive qualities of existential melancholy and pervasive paranoia, sustained
by a coherent visual texture, a switchback-inducing interplay between
Kafkaesque surveillance perspective and the fragmented, instinctive world of
its super-soldier hero. Whilst more than a little over-regarded and already not ageing so well – six hours of cinema with perhaps less than half an hour of
proper human interaction doesn't make for the sort of trilogy one can revisit endlessly – the series sustained a kind of “top that!” élan as
it unfolded that was akin to great performance art, and is definitely destined
to go down as a signal franchise of the millennium’s first decade. Tony Gilroy,
co-author of the first three Bourne
movies and director of the solid corporate thriller Michael Clayton (2007), makes a stab here at taking over the reins and
giving the franchise a makeover by employing a fresh star to play a whole new
lead character, and nominally adapting one of Eric Van Lustbader's continuations of Ludlum's originals. In other words, more
of the same, but different. Trucking in the nervy, intelligent, far less
boyishly handsome Jeremy Renner to play the faux-Bourne, Aaron Cross, The Bourne Legacy unfolds more or less
simultaneously to and just after The
Bourne Ultimatum (2007). As a terse and merciless wielder of patriotic expedience, retired
Colonel Eric Byer (Edward Norton) is asked to stem the damage being done by
Bourne’s rampages, and his former persecutor Pamela Landy’s (Joan Allen)
attempts to blow the whistle on the whole dirty business to the media. Byer decides the
only option is to destroy all of the enhanced warriors produced by the various
connected projects of which Treadstone, the one which produced Bourne, is only
one of many.
Aaron
is one of these marked agents, belonging to another project called Outcome.
Aaron is introduced on a survival training mission in the Canadian Rockies,
engaged in what seems to be this year’s compulsory rite of passage for the
approval of macho onanists: fighting off wolves. Aaron is characterised as
intriguingly different to the general run of the enhanced agents. As an Iraq
veteran who has been badly beaten about over the years, and who steps up for
the team not to exorcise a heinous past but to become the man he feels he ought
to be, operating with a real hunger for doing good, he’s talkative, restless
and uncomfortable with the duplicitous extremes of his new profession. After
emerging from the woods, he tries with little luck to get his taciturn contact, No. 3 (Oscar Isaac), to open up, and when a rocket fired off by a drone aircraft from
the sky annihilates his contact and the cabin about him, Aaron responds with
instantly provoked craft, bringing down the drone and then contriving a clever
way of making his hunters think he’s dead. He returns to the US when he
recognises a face on a news report: Dr Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), a scientist
with the labs that produced the ability-enhancing drugs for the Outcome
subjects, whom Aaron had encountered several times, but who now has almost been
the victim of the same assassination program Byer has initiated.
The Bourne Legacy does little to revise the essential formula of the
series, to its detriment. The assumption that Greengrass capitalised on so
well, that with set-up out of the way he could essentially reduce drama to a
series of breathless, fleet-footed epigrams punctuating set-pieces of stalking,
evasion, and ass-kicking, is difficult to append to a new character who faces a
different, much less initially intriguing quandary. Whereas Bourne had to work
out who he was and then whether or not he was actually a good man, Aaron’s
situation is much less defined and immediately empathetic. Gilroy only offers
hints of the sort of backstory that could lend it more substance: his attempts
to sustain a similar kind of flashback structure to earlier instalments that
reveal fragments of Aaron’s motivations prove perfunctory and actually more
confusing than clarifying. Legacy is
finally crippled by a poorly assembled and frustrating narrative, which
Gilroy’s direction can’t leaven, as the film progresses at a relentlessly
fidgety pace and yet, somehow, also takes forever to get going. It’s somehow
telling that in spite of everything, Hollywood’s basic database of plot
situations now thrusts Weisz into almost the same role she had in her first
major American vehicle, Chain Reaction
(1996), as the hot female scientist dragged about by the dashing hero. The
actual stake of the plot is some annoyingly vague pseudoscience: Aaron needs
Marta to find him a way to free himself from the control of the medication the
Outcome project has him on to maintain the edge of his enhancement, and to make
his edge permanent, so he doesn’t return to the dim bulb he once was. This
notion, that Aaron was once so dumb his recruiting sergeant had to lie about
his IQ so he could get him into the army and now he’s afraid of returning to
that, is redolent of Charly (1968),
but the potential numbing fear and alienation of this motivation is fumbled,
and never gains immediacy.
Particularly
awkward, and indeed straddling the borderlands of bad, are the clumsy,
repetitious scenes of Norton providing exposition for the audience under the
guise of clueing in Keach’s irritable overlord, which have the impression they
might have been shot over a couple of days for some telemovie rather than a
major franchise picture. Norton, looking glazed and testy, could well be
wondering how he slid so far down the totem pole as to be landed with this
functionary bad-guy role. The first half is also interspersed with fleeting
appearances by some of the series’ previous supporting stars, like Allen, David
Strathairn, Scott Glenn, and Albert Finney, in attempts to maintain continuity,
but instead only ever adding up to an infuriating patchwork quilt of false cues
and poorly matched footage, engendering an air of cynical box-ticking. Gilroy
gains a little juice from a dissonance between two levels of engagement with
life and death, as in Michael Clayton,
where murder for profit was just another service to be done well and
efficiently. Here the same feeling is present as the drone pilots trying to
kill Aaron in the Canadian wilds do their work with listless efficiency from
secluded command centres, like uteruses of technology, whilst the man on the
ground experiences it as a primal act of desperate survival. Gilroy, in fact,
only really jars The Bourne Legacy to
life in the blunter essentials of his action set-pieces, where he can at least
reduce the driving forces to girl-in-danger essentials. But these are few and
far between. The eerie and nail-biting moment in which Marta is nearly murdered
by her colleague (Zeljko Ivanek) as he stalks around their laboratory, gunning
down his co-workers with glacial calm, works particularly well, as does the
old-fashioned of melodrama of Aaron bursting in on an attempt by Byer’s
spooks to force Marta into a fake suicide, setting in motion a well-composed
sequence as Aaron proves his smarts in outwitting the assassins in the obstacle
course that is Marta’s country house, a white elephant fixer-upper that
provides numbingly blank walls and clear spaces for a deftly athletic hero to
run, jump, climb and hide.
That
Renner and Weisz succeed in keeping the film focused is true, and indeed almost stating the obvious. They’re both serious, talented actors who can communicate intense
emotions and also thoughtfulness with swift strokes, and the fact that neither
of them are spring chickens, but rather weathered and refreshingly adult
presences – although Weisz manages to get lovelier every year – is nicely out
of step with Hollywood’s usual youth obsession. And yet the film seems to
presume too much of them. Gilroy’s handling of his actors is also an issue,
swinging from mere competence to the distractingly poor: several scenes,
including a crucial one between the leads after Aaron’s first rescue of Marta,
in which major nuggets of plot are breathlessly bandied, are excruciating in
their obvious mixture of exposition and acting exercise-like, high-pressure
banter. The inevitable conclusion is that Gilroy should have set himself the
task of rebuilding the series’ aesthetic from the ground up, instead of
half-heartedly imitating Greengrass’s model. So poor is Legacy’s dramatic balance that it neglects until the last half-hour
to include another super-baddy, a la Karl Urban’s in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), to give Aaron more trouble than the usual
befuddled urban cops to be smacked silly and have their wrists snapped. That
said, Gilroy does manage to a certain extent to revive proceedings in the
steadily mounting urgency of the final act, firstly as Aaron and Marta bluff their
way into a Manila pharmacy plant to steal some of the live toxin that will make
Aaron’s gifts permanent. As in the previous episodes, the hero’s capacity to
pull rabbits from his hat in the form of solutions to rapidly crowding problems
suddenly supplied with reflexive wit comes to the fore at last, before thunderous action
becomes the method. Commencing in a prosaic foot chase through intricate folds
of Manila’s less glamorous areas, the finale begins to assemble the familiar elements of
the series action sequences, like flight across rooftops and dazzling high
speed chases, with increasing cheeky verve. Not too little, but admittedly
rather too late to really save the film, nonetheless the climax delivers what
we all came to see.
){kind=link}
0 Comments