Video review: "The Bourne Legacy"

Jason Bourne is back! ...well, sorta.

The superspy franchise returns for a fourth outing, but the amnesiac hero played by Matt Damon is nowhere to be found. Instead, it's about a new agent named Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner). Like Bourne, he was an elite member of a CIA assassin squad that the bureaucrats have now decided is too dangerous to exist.

So all of the spook outfit's energies are devoted toward taking out their own spies, with new, even more dangerous wetboys assigned to do the dirty work. Based on the Bourne movies, apparently all the CIA does is kill its own agents, with each new batch taking out the last. It's a wonder they ever found bin Laden.

Director Tony Gilroy, who also co-wrote the screenplay, sets up a movie that is almost nonstop chases. Maybe that's a good thing, because whenever the action stops long enough for the characters to talk to each other, it's pure death.

Rachel Weisz plays a doctor whose job it was to keep Cross and his chums doped up on pills that dramatically boosted their intelligence and physical abilities. He swoops into save her, and soon both are on the run.

"The Bourne Legacy" isn't boring, but it is pretty brain dead.

The video does come nicely stocked with extras. If you choose either the solo DVD or Blu-ray edition, you get deleted scenes, feature-length commentary by Gilroy and his production team, a making-of documentary and a breakdown of the motorbike chase sequence.

Upgrade to the combo pack, and you add a number of cool featurettes, including one about Cross' battle with wolves, and a digital copy of the film.

Movie: 2 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars