New ‘Bourne’ has high-impact thrills

By COLIN COVERT
McCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

It starts, as before, with a motionless body — dead? alive? — floating underwater.

This time the immobile figure is Aaron Cross, a medically enhanced hunter-killer in the same U.S. black-ops program that spawned Jason Bourne. He emerges from an icy Alaska lake to participate in a hide-and-seek exercise testing his superhuman stamina and amped-up brainpower.

In a white-knuckle sequence orchestrated to magnificent effect by cinematographer Robert Elswit, Cross (Jeremy Renner) leaps chasms and outmaneuvers a predatory wolf pack.

When he asks another agent whether it’s common for wolves to pursue human quarry the man replies, “They don’t think you’re human.”

He is and he isn’t. As with its chilly, intelligent predecessors, “The Bourne Legacy” follows a field agent whose physiology has been re-engineered as a perfect engine of violence, but whose emotions remain preoccupied with nagging moral issues of right and wrong.
Cross, known as Number Five to his distant overseers, is kept on a short leash. He carries only a few days’ supply of the ultra-amphetamines that provide his killer edge.

When a security breach threatens to expose the clandestine program, management terminates it with ruthless efficiency, live assets and all. Cross, whose participation in the program was mostly unwitting, aims to shut down the shadowy spymasters before his prescriptions run out.