Cross is played by Jeremy Renner with the kind of focus and detached courage he showed in "The Hurt Locker." Because he isn't referred to by name for a long time, and because everybody keeps saying Bourne is still "out there," and because I had not seen the trailer, I wondered for awhile if perhaps Renner was now playing Bourne, but the film finally, mercifully, produces a wanted poster showing Matt Damon, which clears that up.
The movie spends a lot of time in a Manhattan command center for The Program, which is chockablock with computer screens and communications equipment, and can apparently tap into any surveillance camera in the world. In this room we meet the masterminds of The Program, grim veterans played by Scott Glenn, Stacy Keach and Albert Finney, and headed by Edward Norton. They spend a lot of time in each other's faces, trading jargon and spycraft. These men have decided to terminate The Program by giving all their expert agents a triangular yellow pill that causes them to bleed from the right nostril and die. Always the right nostril.
After Cross eludes a drone equipped with a missile in Alaska and fights off more wolves, he makes contact with Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), who has "a Ph.D. and two post-doctoral fellowships" and knows all about the pills. Now there is the best sequence of violence in the movie, which involves a lab technician played by Zeljko Ivanek. Then Cross and Shearing join forces in a desperate quest to stay one jump ahead of the masters of The Program while traveling around the globe to Manila, where the medications are manufactured. The Rachel Weisz character spends a lot more time on screen than females are often allowed in action movies, even though she isn't used for sex appeal. Her performance stands up strongly beside Renner's.
These meds are a virus that alters genes. You can take booster pills from time to time, or with a new iteration you can be "locked in," which is what Cross seeks. He has become accustomed to possessing incredible muscle and mind power. One can only guess what other benefits the pills bestow; to my knowledge Cross never eats or drinks during the entire film.
"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.
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