The Bourne Legacy

The studio apartment where I live has turned into a pizza oven. I am in a unit on the top floor of a 100-year-old building. For the most part it stays cool during the summer; only when the temperature reaches the mid-80s°F and above does it begin to bake.

It has been warm the past couple of days, warm and humid, and today it is forecast to be in the 80s°F again. Today the Gay Pride Parade takes place. Last night, the Saturday before the parade, I was expecting more noise -- the thudding base of dance music from the street party on Broadway -- but everything was surprisingly quiet. Festivities must be going on downtown.

Last night I finally got around to streaming The Bourne Legacy (2012), my first Hollywood blockbuster in several weeks. Recently there has been a marked reduction in new big Hollywood films available to stream from Amazon; that, and Amazon seems to be fiddling with their pricing. It used to be that pricing was very stable. All newly released big Hollywood movie rentals would be priced the same. Now it's all the over the map. Some, when first available, you cannot rent, only buy.

So I've grown tired with the process; hence, the three-week hiatus. But last night I was in the mood for a Saturday-night blockbuster, and I chose wisely.

The Bourne Legacy is directed and co-written by Tony Gilroy, who wrote and directed the refreshing thriller Michael Clayton (2007). Legacy is part of the high-quality Bourne franchise.

In Legacy we have Aaron Cross, played by Jeremy Renner, instead of Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. The secret government program is also different. The one Cross is member of is Operation Outcome, not Treadstone and Blackbriar, which were the black ops programs in the first three Bourne movies.

Outcome is a supersoldier pilot project. Through a combination of drugs and viruses, Operation Outcome engineers genetic enhancements -- an increase in cellular efficiency -- making its operatives faster, stronger, smarter. Think an updated version of the Captain America origin tale. In this case instead of earnest scientists working to discover a supersoldier serum to combat the Axis powers, we have a sprawling, opaque national security state with overlapping secret programs spewing out beta versions of super-assassins. (The idea of a warrior made superior by increased energy production at the the cellular level can be found in another Marvel comic book character, the villain Zeke Stane from the pages of Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man.)

This movie has everything. It is a Call of the Wild with missile-firing drones. It is a timely expose of our nefarious corporate national security state (Big Pharma in bed with high-ranking government intelligence officials). And it has a stupendous motorcycle chase in Manila. You even get the James Bond final scene -- the stud ends up with a beautiful, devoted woman on a boat on some exotic body of water. Cue the Moby theme song. Roll credits.