On DVD/Blu-ray: 'The Bourne Legacy'

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Jason Bourne is back! ...well, sorta.

The superspy franchise returns for a fourth outing, "The Bourne Legacy" (PG-13, 134 min.), but the amnesiac hero played by Matt Damon is nowhere to be found. Instead, it's about a new agent named Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner). Like Bourne, he was an elite member of a CIA assassin squad that the bureaucrats have now decided is too dangerous to exist.

So all of the spook outfit's energies are devoted toward taking out their own spies, with new, even more dangerous wetboys assigned to do the dirty work. Based on the Bourne movies, apparently all the CIA does is kill its own agents, with each new batch taking out the last. It's a wonder they ever found bin Laden.

Director Tony Gilroy, who also co-wrote the screenplay, sets up a movie that is almost nonstop chases.

Maybe that's a good thing, because whenever the action stops long enough for the characters to talk to each other, it's pure death.

Rachel Weisz plays a doctor whose job it was to keep Cross and his chums doped up on pills that dramatically boosted their intelligence and physical abilities. He swoops into save her, and soon both are on the run.

"The Bourne Legacy" isn't boring, but it is pretty brain dead.

The video does come nicely stocked with extras. If you choose either the solo DVD or Blu-ray edition, you get deleted scenes, feature-length commentary by Gilroy and his production team, a making-of documentary and a breakdown of the motorbike chase sequence.

Upgrade to the combo pack, and you add a number of cool featurettes, including one about Cross' battle with wolves, and a digital copy of the film.

Movie: C
Extras: B

Last modified: December 3, 2012
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Nosgoth1979
Tuesday, January 8, 2013 at 3:01 pm

I don’t have anything against Jeremy Renner but I wasn’t exactly anxious to go see this in the theater, so I missed it. It sounds like it was a mixed bag: one of my coworkers at DISH loved it, and my best friend thought it was terrible. So it’s not going to be a movie I purchase without seeing first, but then, I try to resist ‘blind-buying’ these days anyway. That’s gotten me two shelves of movies I’ll likely never watch again, and after I realized how much money I’d spent on them, I decided to change my habits. So anymore I use DISH’s Blockbuster @Home to rent all my movies before I buy them (that is, if I didn’t see it in the theater). And with Blockbuster @Home I get over 100,000 titles by mail and thousands more streamed to my TV and PC. And because it’s a flat pay-by-the-month service, it’s saved me from adding to those shelves of movies I’ll never watch again, which at fifteen to thirty bucks a pop adds up!