The Bourne Legacy (and the pros and cons thereof)
REASONS WHY THE BOURNE LEGACY IS GOOD
Jeremy Renner’s hands.
It’s Flowers for Algernon, but with spies.
Despite pretensions to complexity and conspiracy, the film is easy to follow with one’s brain in the OFF position.
Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz & Edward Norton.
Bang, bang… ‘Splode (if you like that sort of thing).
REASONS WHY THE BOURNE LEGACY IS BADBang, bang… ‘Splode (if you don’t).
It is not the first film in a putative new trilogy; it is the first third of a single story carved up arbitrarily.
Jeremy Renner’s beard(s).
It’s Flowers for Algernon, without depth or subtlety
I swear that Rachel Weisz calls Jeremy Renner’s character “Aaron” and “Eric” interchangeably.
Pointing out that wolves don’t behave the way the wolves in your film are behaving and then not explaining it is stupid.
Overlong chase sequences.
Abortive use of superhuman agent as superhuman agent hunter.
Despite pretensions to complexity and conspiracy, the film is easy to follow with one’s brain in the OFF position.
A Moby song and a circling camera pulling back to a panoramic wide-shot is not, and I can’t emphasise this enough, a denouement.
CONCLUSIONS (W/R/T THE BOURNE LEGACY)
Thus I have proven (aka QED), with ¡SCIENCE!TM, that whilst The Bourne Legacy is too bad to be good, it also has enough distracting and/or redeeming features that it is not bad. Instead it lingers on the border between being and not being, much like Schrödinger’s cat in that people miss the point of the thought experiment and genuinely believe it’s about whether a cat in a box is dead or Alive Alive-O. The Bourne Legacy is not about cats.
