The Bourne Legacy

Plot

Six weeks after Jason Bourne's escape from Russia, Operation Outcome agent Aaron Cross (Number Five) is assigned a training exercise in the Alaskan wilderness as punishment for going AWOL. 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 medication dog 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 Operations Treadstone and Blackbriar. 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 armed drone to eliminate Cross and Number Three. Number Three is killed, but Cross survives. He shoots down the drone with a rifle and removes a subdermal 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.

Production

Development

Universal Pictures originally intended The Bourne Ultimatum to be the final film in the series, but development of another film was under way by October 2008. George Nolfi, who co-wrote The Bourne Ultimatum, was to write the script of a fourth film, not to be based on any of the novels by Robert Ludlum. 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 directing The Adjustment Bureau that September. 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. 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. 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."

However, it was reported in June 2010 that Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote each of the three previous Bourne films, would be writing a script with his brother, screenwriter Dan Gilroy, for a fourth Bourne film to be released sometime in 2012. That October, Universal set the release date for The Bourne Legacy for August 10, 2012, Tony Gilroy was confirmed as the director of the film, and it was also announced that Jason Bourne will not be appearing in The Bourne Legacy.

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." He also said, "you could never replace Matt [Damon] as Jason Bourne. This isn't James Bond. You can't do a prequel. 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."

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." After watching The 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 in Ultimatum as the starting point of this film. Ultimatum plays in the shadows of Legacy for the first 15 minutes—they overlap."

Filming

Although a large part of the film was set in and around Washington, D.C., the real DC appears only in aerial establishing shots. Most of the film was shot over 12 weeks at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, including all interior DC scenes. The old house in Hudson, 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. The scenes set in the "SteriPacific" factory in Manila were actually filmed in the New York Times printing plant in Queens.

Several scenes were shot overseas, mostly in Manila and Marikina (both within Metro Manila), as well as in the Paradise bay of El Nido, Palawan, in the Philippines. Several train scenes at Garak Market station on Seoul Subway Line 3 and nearby areas in Seocho-daero 77-Gil (1308 Seocho 4-dong), Seocho-gu, and Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea, were used in some scenes. The Kananaskis Country region of Alberta, Canada, was used for the scenes set in Alaska.

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."

Soundtrack

The soundtrack to The Bourne Legacy as composed by James Newton Howard, unlike the previous films, which were composed by John Powell, conducted by Pete Anthony, and performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony. It was released digitally on August 7, 2012, by Back Lot Music and physically on August 21, 2012 by Varèse Sarabande Records. A new version of Moby's "Extreme Ways", entitled "Extreme Ways (Bourne's Legacy)", was recorded for the film's end credits.

Release

The Bourne Legacy premiered in New York City on July 30, 2012. It had its Asian premiere at Resorts World Manila in Pasay, Metro Manila, on August 5, 2012, before its release in North America on August 10.

Home media

The Bourne Legacy was released on DVD and Blu-ray on December 11, 2012, in the United States and Canada.

Reception

Box office

The Bourne Legacy grossed $113.2 million in North America and $162.9 million in international markets, for a worldwide total of $276.1 million, against a production budget of $125 million. It was the 29th highest-grossing film of 2012. Worldwide, the film earned $46.6 million during its opening weekend.

In North America, The Bourne Legacy grossed $38.7 million during its opening weekend and debuted at number one, becoming the first film to unseat the previous three-week champion The Dark Knight Rises. Studio research reported that opening-weekend audiences were evenly split between men and women. The opening exceeded Universal's projection of $35 million and sold roughly 400,000 more tickets than The Bourne Identity. In its second weekend, the film fell to number two with $17 million, behind The Expendables 2 ($28.59 million). It remained in second place during its third weekend, earning an additional $9.3 million.

Outside North America, the film's largest opening weekends were in the United Kingdom ($7.2 million), France ($3.4 million), Germany ($2.1 million), and Spain ($1.4 million).

Critical response

On Rotten 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, but The Bourne Legacy proves the franchise has stories left to tell—and benefits from Jeremy Renner's magnetic work in the starring role." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 61 out of 100 based on 42 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment 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." Roger Ebert of the Chicago 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."

Peter Debruge of Variety 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." Michael Atkinson of The Village Voice also wrote a scathing review of the film, saying: "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."

Kenneth Turan of the Los 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." Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter commented on his review that "the series' legacy is lessened by this capable but uninspired fourth episode."

Sequel

From 2012 onward, various additional Bourne film plans have been made and changed, with some intended to be Legacy sequels starring Renner, and others sequels to the original trilogy and starring Damon. The latter eventually saw release as Jason 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, despite Legacy being given mixed reviews by critics. In a December 2012 interview, Matt Damon revealed that he and Paul Greengrass were interested in returning for the next film as Jason Bourne and the director, respectively.

Damon is reported saying that although he had not seen Legacy, 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. On February 21, 2013, it was confirmed that a Bourne 5 was being planned.

On August 2, 2013, Universal hired Tony Gilroy and Anthony Peckham to write the film's script with Renner returning as Cross. On November 8, 2013, the Fast & Furious film series director Justin Lin was announced to direct the film.

On December 2, 2013, it was announced that Renner would return as Cross, Lin would both direct and produce from his production company Perfect Storm Entertainment, and the studio announced an August 14, 2015 release date. On May 9, 2014, Andrew Baldwin was brought in to re-write the film.

On June 18, 2014, the studio pushed back the film from August 14, 2015, to July 15, 2016. In November 2014, the Bourne Legacy sequel was put on hold in favor of Jason Bourne, for which Damon confirmed that he and Greengrass would return.

On January 6, 2015, the studio pushed back the release date to July 29, 2016. The first trailer for the film was aired on February 7, 2016, during Super Bowl 50, which also revealed its title as Jason Bourne. The film premiered July 11, 2016, in the UK and July 29, 2016, in the United States, to mixed reviews.