FILM REVIEW: THE BOURNE LEGACY

Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) in Bourne Legacy.

Our Cross to bear arms

By Ed Rampell

The Bourne Legacy is a highly entertaining, tautly directed movie movie that will have audiences’ tooshes hanging on the edges of their seats during a number of action packed scenes -- especially when Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) gets all Steve McQueen-y in a nail-biting motorcycle chase sequence.

Now your humble cinema scribe likes being entertained as much as anyone (actually, probably more, given all the time he spends in the dark reviewing movies and more), but to this cultural critic, film is not only an entertainment medium and art form, but also a chronicle of its times. Watching this outrageously ultra-violent flick I couldn’t help but reflect on what an egregiously violent society we live in. Did you notice after that heartbreaking shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises there was nary a peep about the possible relationship between our blood-drenched mass entertainment and the mass killings and other brutality in America?

I mean, there were some murmurs about gun control (although not from our major party presidential candidates, including the coward-in-chief), but the silence was deafening about the correlation between mass entertainment and mass murder. Hmm, could this be because much of the news media is owned by the same fine folks who own the movie studios? Could it be, for example, that Rupert Murdoch, who owns 20^th Century Fox as well as Fox News Channel, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and apparently endless phone hacking outlets in Britain, etc., doesn’t want a fair and balanced discussion of the possible link between the mentally unbalanced and trigger happy productions? Hmm, inquiring minds want to know.

Now, I realize that 2008’s The Dark Knight was a motion picture parable about the so-called “War on Terror”, and I wrote about that at the time. Similarly, The Bourne Legacy certainly makes scathing points about contemporary America: Drone warfare; high level intricate intelligence conspiracies; government secrecy; big pharma; military experiments gone awry.

Okay, the filmmakers may have intended social criticism of the powers that be, but be that as it may, mentally unstable people may only perceive the aggression and viciousness inherent in movies like the Bourne flicks, and not be able to grasp their political nuances. And the movie’s Third World sequences show an utter lack of regard for the lives of Filipinos, giving new meaning to the title of John Ford’s 1945 Philippines-set They Were Expendable. Once again, Third World people only serve as exotic background to advance the plot points of the really important Caucasian characters.

The vicious circle and cinema cycle seems to be: A warlike society that endlessly invades, bombs, bullies other countries (and lest we forget, its own oppressed peoples) requires an aggressive populace to fight its dirty wars and also spawns a blood soaked culture, which in turn generates more belligerent individuals, who have easy access to weapons of mass murder, and round and round and on and on we go, traipsing towards Judgment Day.