| The Bourne Legacy | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Tony Gilroy |
| Screenplay by |
|
| Story by | Tony Gilroy |
| Based on | Jason Bourne series byRobert Ludlum |
| Produced by |
|
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Robert Elswit |
| Edited by | John Gilroy |
| Music by | James Newton Howard |
Production companies | |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures[1][2] |
Release dates |
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Running time | 135 minutes[3] |
| Country | United States[1][2] |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $125 million[4][5] |
| Box office | $280.4 million[5] |
The Bourne Legacy is a 2012 Americanaction-thriller film directed byTony Gilroy, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brotherDan. It is the fourth installment in theBourne series of films followingThe Bourne Ultimatum (2007). It starsJeremy Renner,Rachel Weisz,Edward Norton,Stacy Keach, andOscar Isaac. The film follows Aaron Cross, a fictional black ops agent and member of Operation Outcome. Cross must run for his life once former CIA assassinJason Bourne's actions lead to the exposure ofOperation Treadstone and its successor, Operation Blackbriar.
The Bourne Legacy is the only film in theBourne series that does not feature titular characterJason Bourne; actorMatt Damon chose not to appear in the film becausePaul Greengrass was not the director. Nevertheless, Bourne is shown in pictures and mentioned by name several times throughout the film. Parts ofThe Bourne Legacy take place at the same time as the events portrayed in the previous film,The Bourne Ultimatum. Filming primarily took place inNew York City, with some scenes shot in thePhilippines,South Korea, andCanada.
The Bourne Legacy premiered in New York City on July 30, 2012. It was theatrically released in the rest of the United States on August 10, 2012. It received mixed reviews from critics but was a box-office success, grossing $280 million on a $125 million budget.
Six weeks after Jason Bourne's escape from Russia,[a] Operation Outcome agent Aaron Cross (Number Five) is assigned a training exercise in the Alaskan wilderness as punishment for goingAWOL. He must traverse the rugged terrain to find a remote cabin while being stalked by wolves. The cabin is operated by Number Three, another Outcome agent assigned there as punishment. Cross lies and tells Number Three that he has lost his program medicationdog tags containing "chems" that Outcome agents must take to maintain their mental and physical enhancements.
Colonel Eric Byer is tasked with containing the fallout from CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy's exposure of OperationsTreadstone and Blackbriar.[b] He and his team find several online videos in which Treadstone and Outcome medical directors Albert Hirsch and Dan Hillcott appeared together; if discovered, the videos could lead investigators to discover Operation Outcome. Byer orders Outcome to be shut down and its agents and doctors killed to protect the secrecy of other clandestine programs.
Byer deploys an armeddrone to eliminate Cross and Number Three. Number Three is killed, but Cross survives. He shoots down the drone with a rifle and removes asubdermal tracking implant from his hip. He traps an aggressive wolf and forces it to swallow his tracker. Another drone targets the tracker and kills the wolf, leading Byer's team to conclude that Cross was killed. At Sterisyn Morlanta, the pharmaceutical company supporting Outcome, researcher Dr. Donald Foite seemingly snaps and methodically shoots down Hillcott and his colleagues who have been working on Outcome. After being cornered by guards, Foite shoots himself, leaving Dr. Marta Shearing as the program's sole surviving scientist.
Cross travels from Alaska to Chicago to recover a stashed car, money, and fake identification. Running low on "chems" and seeing news that his Outcome provider, Dr. Shearing, had survived the shooting, he drives to her home in Maryland. Meanwhile, Byer sends four assassins disguised as federal agents to kill Dr. Shearing and make it look like a suicide. Cross intervenes, kills the assassins, and burns down Dr. Shearing's house to cover their escape. Shearing tells Cross that the program already used a virus to make his physical enhancements permanent, eliminating his need for physical "chems". Since it is impossible for Cross and Shearing to obtain more mental "chems", they plan to fly to the Philippines to obtain a live virus to make Cross's mental enhancements permanent.
Cross and Shearing use false identities to fly to Manila, bluff their way into a pharmaceutical plant where Sterisyn Morlanta has a research lab, and infect Cross with the live virus. Meanwhile, Byer's team finds CCTV footage of Shearing atJFK airport and determines her itinerary. Byer also learns that Cross is alive and that he, too, flew to Manila. Byer alerts the plant's security team, but Cross subdues the security guards and causes a panic on the plant floor; Cross and Shearing escape in the commotion. Cross becomes incapacitated from the virus, so Shearing gets a room where they can hide and Cross can recover. Byer dispatches LARX #3, a super soldier, to kill Cross and Shearing. The next morning, Cross recovers from being injected with the virus. Local police discover Cross and Shearing's hideout, but they escape on foot. The police and LARX #3 chase them by motorcycle through the streets of Manila. They lose the police and LARX #3 dies while pursuing them, but Cross is shot and loses consciousness. Shearing bribes a nearby boatman to help them escape Manila. Byer and his team, who lost their trail, raid the empty room for clues; they find the message "No More" written on the mirror with Cross's medication dog tags hanging beside it.
Back in New York, Blackbriar supervisor Noah Vosen lies to the Senate, stating that Blackbriar was created solely to track down Bourne and that Pamela Landy committed treason by aiding Bourne and releasing top secret Treadstone files to the press. Meanwhile, Cross recovers from his bullet wounds on the boat out of Manila. He and Shearing use a chart to determine where they should go next.
Universal Pictures originally intendedThe Bourne Ultimatum to be the final film in the series, but development of another film was under way by October 2008.[6]George Nolfi, who co-wroteThe Bourne Ultimatum, was to write the script of a fourth film, not to be based on any of the novels by Robert Ludlum.[6] Joshua Zetumer had been hired to write a parallel script—a draft which could be combined with another (Nolfi's, in this instance)—by August 2009 since Nolfi would be directingThe Adjustment Bureau that September.[7]Matt Damon stated in November 2009 that no script had been approved and that he hoped that a film would begin shooting in mid-2011.[8] The next month, he said that he would not do another Bourne film without Paul Greengrass, who announced in late November that he had decided not to return as director.[9] In January 2010, Damon said that there would "probably be a prequel of some kind with another actor and another director before we do another one just because I think we're probably another five years away from doing it."[10]
However, it was reported in June 2010 thatTony Gilroy, who co-wrote each of the three previousBourne films, would be writing a script with his brother, screenwriterDan Gilroy, for a fourthBourne film to be released sometime in 2012.[11] That October, Universal set the release date forThe Bourne Legacy for August 10, 2012,[12] Tony Gilroy was confirmed as the director of the film, and it was also announced that Jason Bourne will not be appearing inThe Bourne Legacy.[13]
Gilroy said he did not get involved with the project "until the rules were that Matt [Damon] was gone, Matt and Paul [Greengrass] were gone, there was no Jason Bourne. That was the given when I had the first conversation about this. So it was very important to me, extremely important to me, that everything that had happened before be well preserved and be enhanced if possible by what we're doing now."[14] He also said, "you could never replace Matt [Damon] as Jason Bourne. This isn'tJames Bond. You can't do aprequel. You can't do any of those kinds of things, because there was never any cynicism attached to the franchise, and that was the one thing they had to hang on to."[15]
Gilroy "never had any intention of ever coming back to this realm at all—much less write it, much less direct it. Then I started a really casual conversation about what we could do in a post-Jason Bourne setting. I was only supposed to come in for two weeks, but the character we came up with, Aaron Cross, was so compelling."[16] After watchingThe Bourne Ultimatum again, Gilroy called his brother, screenwriter Dan Gilroy, and said,"'The only thing you could do is sort of pull back the curtain and say there's a much bigger conspiracy.' So we had to deal with what happened inUltimatum as the starting point of this film.Ultimatum plays in the shadows ofLegacy for the first 15 minutes—they overlap."[16]
In speaking about the film's storyline, Gilroy drew a distinction between the fictional programs in theBourne film series:
On a practical level, the Treadstone program was about assassination. They're basically assassins. They live in the world—you can see Clive Owen [inThe Bourne Identity] as a piano teacher, they have covers—but they're essentially assassins. There was nothing that would be described as espionage, [they're] basically a kill squad. The Outcome program that Aaron [played by Jeremy Renner] is part of, [Oscar Isaac's character] is one of them too... The conceit is that [Edward Norton's character] is the mastermind of this entire franchise. We're stepping back a little bit in time here, he's been a developer, he's been at the nexus of the corporate military and intelligence communities. There's a very large corporate element, pharmaceutical corporate element...[17]
Although a large part of the film was set in and aroundWashington, D.C., the real DC appears only in aerialestablishing shots. Most of the film was shot over 12 weeks at theKaufman Astoria Studios inQueens, New York, including all interior DC scenes.[18] The old house inHudson, New York, used as Shearing's house was unable to accommodate the weight of equipment and crew, so it was used only for exterior shots, and all interior scenes were filmed on a Kaufman Astoria soundstage.[18] The scenes set in the "SteriPacific" factory in Manila were actually filmed in theNew York Times printing plant in Queens.[19]
Several scenes were shot overseas, mostly inManila andMarikina (both withinMetro Manila),[20][21] as well as in the Paradise bay ofEl Nido, Palawan, in the Philippines.[22] Several train scenes atGarak Market station onSeoul Subway Line 3 and nearby areas in Seocho-daero 77-Gil (1308 Seocho 4-dong),Seocho-gu, andGangnam-gu,Seoul, South Korea, were used in some scenes.[23] TheKananaskis Country region ofAlberta, Canada, was used for the scenes set inAlaska.[18]
Gilroy said, "there are three deleted scenes—we just mixed them and color corrected them [...] but what I like about it is all three scenes happen in the movie. One of them's referred to and they're completely legitimate parts of our story, they absolutely happen in our film, we just didn't have time to show them to you so there's nothing off to the side. I think they'll be on the straight-up DVD."[14]
The soundtrack toThe Bourne Legacy as composed byJames Newton Howard, unlike the previous films, which were composed byJohn Powell, was released digitally onAugust 7, 2012, byBack Lot Music and physically onAugust 21, 2012 byVarèse Sarabande Records.[24][25] A new version ofMoby's "Extreme Ways", entitled "Extreme Ways (Bourne's Legacy)", was recorded for the film's end credits.[26]
The Bourne Legacy premiered in New York City on July 30, 2012. It had its Asian premiere atResorts World Manila inPasay,Metro Manila, onAugust 5, 2012, before its release in North America on August 10.[27]
The Bourne Legacy was released on DVD and Blu-ray on December 11, 2012, in the United States and Canada.[28]
In its opening weekend,The Bourne Legacy grossed about $38.7 million in the United States and Canada and debuted at #1 of the box office charts, surpassing Universal's expectation of $35 million. It grossed $46.6 million worldwide in its first weekend.[4] The film sold roughly 400,000 more tickets on its opening weekend than the first film in the series,The Bourne Identity. Studio research reported that audiences were evenly mixed among the sexes.[29] The film grossed $113.2 million in North America and $162.9 million in foreign countries, bringing the film's worldwide total to $276.1 million.[4]
OnRotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 56% based on 235 reviews, with an average rating of 5.90/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "It isn't quite as compelling as the earlier trilogy, butThe Bourne Legacy proves the franchise has stories left to tell—and benefits from Jeremy Renner's magnetic work in the starring role."[30] OnMetacritic, the film has a score of 61 out of 100 based on 42 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[31] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[32]
Lisa Schwarzbaum ofEntertainment Weekly gave the film an A−, commenting that "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. Jason Bourne's legacy is in good hands."[33]Roger Ebert of theChicago Sun-Times gave the film 2½ stars out of 4, writing: "The Bourne Legacy is always gripping in the moment. The problem is in getting the moments to add up. I freely confess that for at least the first 30 minutes I had no clear idea of why anything was happening. The dialogue is concise, the cinematography is arresting and the plot is a murky muddle."[34]
Peter Debruge ofVariety wrote that "the combination of Robert Elswit's elegant widescreen lensing and the measured editing by Tony Gilroy's brother John may be easier to absorb than Greengrass' hyperkinetic docu-based style, but the pic's convoluted script ensures that auds will emerge no less overwhelmed."[35] Michael Atkinson ofThe Village Voice also wrote a scathing review of the film, saying: "TheBourne films have more than just overstayed their welcome and outlasted the Ludlum books—they've beenVan Halenized, with an abrupt change of frontman and a resulting dip in personality."[36]
Kenneth Turan of theLos Angeles Times gave the film a positive review, called the film "an exemplary espionage thriller that has a strong sense of what it wants to accomplish and how best to get there." He especially commended Gilroy's work on the film: "Gilroy knows the underpinnings of this world inside out and appreciates how essential it is to maintain and extend the house style of cool and credible intelligence that marked the previous films."[37]Todd McCarthy ofThe Hollywood Reporter commented on his review that "the series' legacy is lessened by this capable but uninspired fourth episode."[38]
From 2012 onward, various additional Bourne film plans have been made and changed, with some intended to beLegacy sequels starring Renner, and others sequels to the original trilogy and starring Damon. The latter eventually saw release asJason Bourne in 2016. As of 2017, a second Renner film was considered unlikely, though such a work had been in pre-production stages since 2013. The shifting course of these projects has been somewhat complex.
In September 2012,Universal Pictures had stated at a media conference in Los Angeles that they were likely to release more Bourne films, despiteLegacy being given mixed reviews by critics.[39] In a December 2012 interview,Matt Damon revealed that he andPaul Greengrass were interested in returning for the next film as Jason Bourne and the director, respectively.[40]
Damon is reported saying that although he had not seenLegacy, he intends to do so because not only is he curious to see it, but also because he has enjoyed Jeremy Renner in everything he has seen him in. However, in June 2014, executive producer Frank Marshall said that Matt Damon would not be returning for the next Bourne film, contrary to earlier statements made by Damon and rumors surrounding his return to the franchise.[41] On February 21, 2013, it was confirmed that aBourne 5 was being planned.[42][43]
On August 2, 2013, Universal hiredTony Gilroy andAnthony Peckham to write the film's script with Renner returning as Cross.[44] On November 8, 2013, theFast & Furious film series directorJustin Lin was announced to direct the film.[45]
On December 2, 2013, it was announced that Renner would return as Cross, Lin would both direct and produce from his production companyPerfect Storm Entertainment, and the studio announced an August 14, 2015 release date.[46] On May 9, 2014, Andrew Baldwin was brought in to re-write the film.[47]
On June 18, 2014, the studio pushed back the film from August 14, 2015, to July 15, 2016.[48] In November 2014, theBourne Legacy sequel was put on hold in favor ofJason Bourne, for which Damon confirmed that he and Greengrass would return.[49]
On January 6, 2015, the studio pushed back the release date to July 29, 2016.[50] The first trailer for the film was aired on February 7, 2016, duringSuper Bowl 50, which also revealed its title asJason Bourne.[51] The film premiered July 11, 2016, in the UK and July 29, 2016, in the United States, to mixed reviews.
ProducerFrank Marshall saidUniversal Pictures is hoping to make a sixth film in the franchise, a direct sequel toJason Bourne. He stated that a sequel toThe Bourne Legacy featuring Renner's Cross is unlikely, although he did not explicitly rule it out.[52] However, in March 2017, Matt Damon cast doubt upon any sequel, hinting that people "might be done" with the character.[53]
The public market area in Marikina City will be closed to traffic on Wednesday and Thursday for the filming of the upcoming spy thriller 'The Bourne Legacy'[...]
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