The Bourne Legacy Reviews
Top CriticShares crucial DNA with the earlier films but is drawn from the shallower end of the gene pool.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Perhaps the most interesting question arising from The Bourne Legacy is just how long the filmmakers hope to trade on the Bourne name without any, you know, Bourne.
Renner and Weisz work well together as two hunted souls who initially need each other for utilitarian reasons.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Gilroy's a fine writer - he also penned Michael Clayton - but without the discipline of an action veteran like Greengrass to rein him in, he indulges his weakness to over-explain things.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It's twists and turns and nothing else. And fast and furious as it may be, if this is the best this once-smart series has to offer, this is no legacy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The Bourne Legacy is one of Alfred Hitchcock's "refrigerator movies," in that it succeeds pretty well "in the moment" but starts to fall apart when considered in retrospect.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The movie's last hour or so squanders these rich narrative possibilities in an incoherently plotted, generically action-packed anticlimax.
Gilroy keeps the Bourne mythology firmly intact while moving it forward, and leaves the door open for just about anything in the future.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
This is a talky, draggy thriller, muddled by flashbacks and woefully low on action.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Bourne fans will find much to enjoy about The Bourne Legacy, even if they are forced to do without the title character.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Renner and the audience deserve better.
Gilroy has brought characteristic taste and skill to a nearly impossible task: embracing the past without completely erasing it, thereby creating an invitingly complicated and open-ended future.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It all but squanders Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz, although with actors less appealing, "The Bourne Legacy" would be even worse.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Complex, unexpected and dazzling, alternating relentless tension with resonant emotional moments, this is an exemplary espionage thriller that has a strong sense of what it wants to accomplish and how best to get there.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Can a Bourne-again movie succeed without Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, without Bourne himself, and without a Robert Ludlum book as the production's turn-by-turn guide? Yes, it can.
"The Bourne Legacy" makes the most of its inheritance and sets the stage for a long, rich genealogy to come.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Gilroy, who's had a hand in writing the previous three films in the franchise, cleverly overlaps the events of this chapter with those of The Bourne Ultimatum.
Seeing a Bourne film for the plotting feels like reading Playboy for the articles, but if that's your thing, this is your movie.
A momentum-driven thriller that depends less on star power than on epic action sequences.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Bourne Legacy is dwarfed by the three smash Bourne movies that preceded it. But for summer movie night escapsim, you could do worse.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The best thing that can be said about "The Bourne Legacy" is that Renner will survive it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
By the time Rachel Weisz, as a scientist called Dr. Marta Shearing, showed up in a lab coat, I stopped trying to parse every plot twist and just went with the action flow.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
He won't erase any memories of Damon, but Renner's turn is strong enough to stand on its own.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Structurally, yes, it's loaded with all the lies, schemes and high-tech trickery that are staples of the espionage genre. But a deeper, more individualistic source of tension propels the film along.
The new movie continues the Bourne tradition of exciting, reality-based thrillers, but when the series lost its star it lost most of its soul.
Gilroy has been around the franchise from the start, and he finds a satisfying medium between the previous directors' disparate styles, the cool jazz tones of Doug Liman and the shaky-cam faux-documentary approach of Paul Greengrass.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Taken on its own terms, "The Bourne Legacy" is a pretty good action thriller.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The overall tone is familiar, refried, redundant.
"The Bourne Legacy" is a lean, clean killing machine that supplies some dark, late-summer thrills and chills and breathes new life into a seemingly extinct franchise.
...there are excellent performances and a few really first-rate suspense-set pieces...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
The last half-hour of the film is one enormous action sequence in Manila that must have been exceptionally difficult to shoot and even harder to edit together. It's also hard to sit through.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It's ultimately not quite satisfying. It's a quick, tense trip, rather than a thrill ride.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"The Bourne Legacy" is always gripping in the moment. The problem is in getting the moments to add up.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
One analyst spits out that "he's Treadstone without the inconsistencies." It seems that Legacy is Bourne with some added in.
Gilroy, who as a screenwriter has shaped the movie saga from the beginning, trades the wired rhythms established in the past two episodes by Paul Greengrass for something more realistic and closer to the ground. The change is refreshing.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Renner and scientist Rachel Weisz are sympathetic enough (although lacking in Matt Damon's all-American approachability), and the movie flies along briskly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The Bourne films have more than just overstayed their welcome and outlasted the Ludlum books -- they've been Van Halenized, with an abrupt change of frontman and a resulting dip in personality.
The series's legacy is lessened by this capable but uninspired fourth episode.
Subbing character actor Jeremy Renner into a franchise that requires Matt Damon-caliber magnetism, series scribe Tony Gilroy takes over the helming duties with an overlong sequel that features too little action and an unnecessarily complicated plot.
