movie review: the bourne legacy (2012)

ok if you don't know anything about it, this is a franchise now which could end up becoming america's only kind of james bond styled franchise of movies........there are now four of them, matt damon was probably in the first two, while he was pretty cool in good will hunting and day at the zoo, he just seems like the nice guy next door in the white-picket fence to be playing an assassin, so i never really thought he was the right type-cast for a total cia-styled killer/assassin.

the guy playing that role in this movie is much better suited to it and the movie doesn't make the mistake of going over-kill with all the hand to hand combat scenes that go really overboard in a lot of movies these days and just becomes absurd.... this movie keeps it to a minimum and it's all pretty good...... all of the car chases, action scenes, bike chases, including a motorbike chase in bangkok are all similarly understated but tasteful as far as this kind of cinema goes and i generally would give this movie a pass on this level

in terms of the leads, it's a guy/girl hero/heroine working for some shady, compartmentalized departments of black ops in u.s. government, the female lead is a chemist/scientist so not all james bondy........ there's not much chemistry between them and that was actually really fine with me as if i want to see a couple kissing i'll just look in the rear view mirror of my taxi and hopefully it won't be two guys and can you please stop the slurping sounds, it's nasty, now get out of my car, you just wasted $10 of my money now coz i can't even ethically charge you the fare as you never got to your destination, kissers, see ya, get out of my cab

now the critics, home pundits on imdb didn't like this movie because of the script and by that they must mean the first half of the movie.... see this movie plays out well plot-wise in the last half, and my only criticisms was some of the shots/cinematography in that half were too close, e.g., during indoor shots, leading to action sequences (not involving stunts) that just don't seem to be perfect -- which is actually very common with these big-budget californian movies, blame the bourne anglo-supremacy movement for that

we're not comparing this movie to matt damon's bournes as don't recall seeing any of them although might have but they never seemed appealing due to reason mentioned above of damon not being appropriate for killer cia type -- tennis player yes, pro bowler yes, accountant, yes, cia-killer, no, too sweet-faced

the key issue with this movie is the opening -- there's some snowy mountain scenes with a predator, okay, what-evs.... the plot then is not made clear due to clumsy storytelling about some black-ops govt. programs working on special drugs to augment/enhance human genes/reactions to warrior type situations (curiously and co-incidentally something we touched on in last post, really by co-incidence)..... anyway, predator drone mountain wolf mountain climber scene is all visually okay and all that and is basically telling you something that's actually true, that there are black ops operations within military/spy agencies where u.s. military personnel are slated for internal assassination without even a formal court-marshall, all black-ops and these things really do happen i'm fairly sure, although not in the colorful hollywood/filmy way with the drones and explosions and wolves, but no-one's blaming the film-makers for that as it's not a documentary and the real situations are kind of just boring and don't involve car chases at all............

anyway, after this opening it's where the film really drops the ball, there are clumsy scenes where we see some agents dying from taking their go-pills or whatever and you're all like: gee, pills can kill people, i didn't know that coz my name's cletus the slack-jawed yokel (kidding - everyone knows pills can kill people).....so it's dopey -- then the movie just gets lost for about 20 minutes due to bourne anglo-supremacy and general drug abuse by the makers and then it gets un-derailed and the final 50 minutes or whatever play out normally and properly

this movie gets 3 stars out of 5, maybe 3 and a quarter

this song's cool by the way, no relationship to the movie though
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM7H0ooV_o8