The solid Renner makes an engaging figure as Cross, a man, who, unlike Bourne, knows what he signed up for and needs to maintain his biologically enhanced status to survive while protecting scientist Rachel Weisz from the secret project's savage shutdown.
You'll certainly need to have seen the previous Bourne movies to know what's going on here. And even then, you you might not be any the wiser. Vast tracts of this dense, over-long thriller are taken up with spy-management gobbledygook with occasional forays into genetic-modification gibberish.
Which does make some of the participants sound like particularly clever boffins - especially Edward Norton as the guy wanting Cross off the agency payroll.
Somewhere in all that verbiage is a debate about the moral compromises and lethal decisions security agencies have to make in the name of national security, which might be interesting, again, if this movie felt like it was set in the real world.
But for all that talk, it dissipates tension rather than builds it. It does have some moderately exciting action but other than the aforementioned subzero wildlife encounter and a seemingly endless motorbike chase through Manila, this is nothing its predecessors haven't already done before, and better.
The Bourne Legacy
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton
Director: Tony Gilroy
Rating: M (violence)
Running time: 135 mins
Stars: 3/5
Verdict: Re-Bourne a retread
- TimeOut
