The Bourne Legacy

Director: Tony Gilroy

Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Scott Glenn, Stacy Keach, Albert Finney

The opening sequence finds Cross on a training exercise in Alaska, fighting off wolves and taking pills as he makes his way through the wilderness.

His training mission takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Bourne Supremacy, which saw Jason Bourne exposing secret CIA operations called Treadstone and Blackbriar, created for the purpose of training contract killers with almost superhuman abilities.

As the CIA scrambles to control the fallout from exposure, they start to kill off agents in other programmes before anyone finds out about them. Problem is Cross survives, and enlisting the help of Dr Marta Shearing, he must rush around the world trying to get the medication necessary for his continued existence as a super-agent.

Cue large-scale, quickly tedious action sequences that take the series to unexplored regions of the Far East and breathtakingly executed but yawn-inducing tricks on motorbikes in rush-hour traffic.

While Gilroy has shown success in his previous films, Michael Clayton and Duplicity, he lacks rugged, frenetic energy of direction.

Renner shows he has what it takes to carry an action film and he does well despite the lack of chemistry between him and the infuriatingly placid Weisz.

By the time the Moby track arrives signalling the end of the film just over two hours after Alaska, you'd be hard-pressed to figure out the mess of decoys and false leads the plot has thrown up in an effort to hide its failure to launch.

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