The Bourne Legacy asks a question the first three films never had to: what happens when the man at the center of the conspiracy is not Jason Bourne? The 2012 film answers with Aaron Cross, a black ops agent played by Jeremy Renner, and a story that runs alongside the events of The Bourne Ultimatum rather than after them. Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote all three previous Bourne films, directs and co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Dan. The result is a film that understands the machinery of the series better than it understands how to make an audience care about a new man caught in it.
Trailer, via Bourne.
Aaron Cross and the Wolves of Alaska
The Bourne Legacy opens six weeks after Jason Bourne’s escape from Russia. Cross, listed as Number Five in Operation Outcome, is in the Alaskan wilderness on a training exercise — punishment for leaving his post without permission. He has to cross rough country to reach a remote cabin while wolves stalk him. The cabin is run by Number Three, another Outcome agent sent there as punishment. Cross lies to him, saying he lost the program medication dog tags that hold the “chems” Outcome agents need to keep their mental and physical enhancements.
That lie is the engine of the whole film. Cross is not a man hunting answers about who he was. He is a man who needs a pill. The distinction matters, and it is where The Bourne Legacy separates itself from the films before it — for better and for worse.
Byer Shuts It All Down
Colonel Eric Byer, played by Edward Norton, is tasked with containing the fallout from CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy’s exposure of Treadstone and Blackbriar. He and his team find online videos showing Treadstone and Outcome medical directors Albert Hirsch and Dan Hillcott together. If investigators find those videos, they find Operation Outcome.
Byer’s answer is to shut Outcome down and kill its agents and doctors. He sends an armed drone after Cross and Number Three. Number Three dies. Cross survives — he shoots the drone down with a rifle, cuts a subdermal tracking implant out of his hip, traps an aggressive wolf and forces it to swallow the tracker. A second drone follows the tracker and kills the wolf. Byer’s team concludes Cross is dead.
It is a fine sequence, and it is the last time the film’s plot moves with real momentum. Everything after it is a man running toward a pharmacy.
Marta Shearing and the Sterisyn Morlanta Shooting
At Sterisyn Morlanta, the pharmaceutical company backing Outcome, researcher Dr. Donald Foite snaps and methodically shoots Hillcott and his colleagues who worked on Outcome. Guards corner him. He shoots himself. Dr. Marta Shearing, played by Rachel Weisz, is left as the program’s only surviving scientist.
Weisz is the best thing in The Bourne Legacy. Shearing is a civilian who did careful work for people who kill civilians, and Weisz plays her with a flat, procedural calm that cracks at the right moments. The film’s middle stretch — Cross and Shearing moving through a world that wants them dead — works because she is in it.
The Cast Around the Edges
The Bourne Legacy stacks its supporting roles with actors who have done this kind of thing before, and the film mostly uses them as furniture:
- Jeremy Renner as Aaron Cross
- Rachel Weisz as Dr. Marta Shearing
- Edward Norton as Byer
- Stacy Keach as Turso
- Oscar Isaac as Outcome #3
- Joan Allen as Pamela Landy
- Albert Finney as Dr. Albert Hirsch
- Scott Glenn as Ezra Kramer
Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert Finney and Scott Glenn all return from earlier Bourne films. Matt Damon does not. The character Jason Bourne never appears as a character — Damon chose not to appear because Paul Greengrass did not return to direct — but Bourne is shown in pictures and mentioned by name several times, and parts of The Bourne Legacy take place at the same time as Ultimatum.
That absence is not a small thing. The Bourne Legacy is a 135-minute film built on the assumption that the audience will transfer its loyalty from one agent to another. It never quite earns that transfer.
A Fourth Film That Was Not Supposed to Happen
The Bourne Ultimatum was meant to be the last one. Plans for a fourth film were announced in 2008. Gilroy, who co-wrote each of the three previous Bourne films, came back to co-write and direct. Filming took place mostly in New York City, with scenes shot in the Philippines, South Korea and Canada.
The Bourne Legacy premiered in New York City on July 30, 2012, and opened in the rest of the United States on August 10. It grossed $276 million worldwide and got mixed reviews. A fifth film, Jason Bourne, which is a sequel to Ultimatum, came out in 2016.
There was never just one.
That tagline is the film’s whole thesis in five words, and it is a better pitch than the film is a movie. The Bourne Legacy wants to say that Bourne was one product of a system, and Cross is another. But the system is the interesting part, and the film keeps cutting away from it to watch Cross run.
What The Bourne Legacy Gets Right and What It Wastes
The Bourne Legacy is at its best when it is about process. Byer’s team works through a problem — a video exists, a scientist is a liability, a drone is available — and the film lets you watch them decide. Edward Norton plays Byer as a man doing a job, not a villain savoring cruelty, and that is the right call. The film’s cold institutional logic is more frightening than any single fight scene in it.
The problem is Cross. Renner is a good actor and a credible physical presence, but the film gives him a goal — get more chems — instead of a question. Bourne wanted to know who he was. Cross wants a refill. That is a thinner engine, and 135 minutes is a long time to run on it.
The Alaska sequence is the film’s high point. The wolf, the tracker, the drone — it is clean, brutal and clever. The Sterisyn Morlanta shooting is the film’s most disturbing scene, and it earns its violence. But the middle of The Bourne Legacy sags, and the ending arrives without the resolution the setup promised.
The Bourne Legacy is not a bad film. It is a film that mistakes expansion for depth. It adds agents, programs and doctors to a story that was already complete, and it asks Renner to carry a franchise on a character who was never given a reason to exist beyond the plot’s need for him. Weisz and Norton make it worth watching. The script does not make it worth remembering.
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