Bourne to Run: THE BOURNE LEGACY

The biggest question I had going into The Bourne Legacy was “What happens to a series when it’s no longer about what it’s about?” Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity and the sequels – Supremacy and Ultimatum – from Paul Greengrass star Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, an amnesiac spy who, in order to solve the mystery his identity, has to stay one step ahead of shadowy United States operatives bent on taking him out to prevent that very discovery. It’s a series of dizzyingly complicated character-driven spy thrillers that together form a rare hugely satisfying trilogy. They’re three films that snap together with excellent resonance and airtight plotting all the way through. They are my favorite action movies of the past decade. It was so complete a trilogy of films that Damon didn’t want to come back for a fourth. Greengrass didn’t either. He quipped that it should be called “Bourne Redundancy.” But there was money to be made from the lucrative franchise so here we are.

No longer about Jason Bourne’s search for identity, Legacy nonetheless maintains consistency with the prior trilogy by not only retaining supporting actors like Joan Allen, Scott Glenn, Albert Finney and David Strathairn in small roles, but also bringing in one of the series’ scripter Tony Gilroy (on the heels of his two great directorial outings Michael Clayton and Duplicity) to write and direct. Without Damon’s Bourne, this film focuses on a new character, Aaron Cross, a secret agent in a similar secret program. He’s played by Jeremy Renner. (After Mission: Impossible 4 and The Avengers, this marks the third time he's been brought in to boost a franchise's ranks). The plot of this film starts parallel to the action of The Bourne Ultimatum. While Jason Bourne is doing what he does there, Cross is off in the Alaskan wilderness on a training exercise. When the masterminds of this whole national-security conspiracy panic, they decide to eliminate this particular program, swooping in to kill their field assets before the whole experiment is revealed to the public.

Of course, Cross avoids death and sets off to find answers. Back in the program’s headquarters, while the familiar suits are on Bourne-related business, new characters played by Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Donna Murphy and Corey Stoll fret in dark, tense control rooms, staring at monitors and flipping through classified documents. They’re trying to stay one step ahead of the agents they’re trying to dispose of. Cross sidesteps them and finds himself aiding and aided by a government scientist (Rachel Weisz) who is also targeted in this bloody cover-up. Soon they’re racing together on an intercontinental escape from the people they once worked for. This is familiar Bourne material with a clever, skillful protagonist moving through fake passports and running from all kinds of armed security, while the real villains sit drumming their fingers impatiently in tense conference rooms and in front of glowing screens.

Although in the grand scheme of all that’s come before, this is merely a feature-length footnote in an epilogue, time will tell if this is a spin-off, a reboot, a one-off, or a cause for Jason Bourne to come out of hiding in a future sequel and bring it all full circle. I don’t know what to hope for, myself, since Ultimatum finished off his story so spectacularly. It’d be difficult to top. But anyways, we’re talking Bourne Legacy here. It’s a tense film filled with lengthy scenes of grim exposition and quick bursts of well-staged action. Gilroy ditches Greengrass’s shaky-cam style for something moderately more stately with effective tension-gathering cinematography from the great Robert Elswit. At the very least, together they manage to create a car chase sequence that’s a more than adequate addition to this franchise’s hallmark area of excellence. They also keep the chilly spy-versus-spy feeling of it all nice and cool.

Renner gives a fine performance as a troubled betrayed operative and Weisz is more than ready to work as his rattled counterpart. They’re fine action movie actors, but it’s hard for the story to not feel a little thin. They’re cogs more than characters. Because the earlier films had a MacGuffin that tied intimately into the character’s inner dilemma – Bourne was searching for his history, his true identity, after all – it’s a little disappointing to find that Gilroy has put in its place a more literal object to retrieve. Aaron Cross and his scientist ally are on the lookout for a little pill that his phase of the top-secret project was forcing agents to take. Without it, Cross will be debilitated or something. It doesn’t really matter what the pill will do; all that matters is that it’s important enough to keep the plot moving. Which also happens to be the movie’s main reason for existence. It keeps the Bourne franchise going. And if that has to happen, it sure could be a lot worse than just a fun, if inconsequential, action thriller, even though the franchise has set a much higher bar for itself.

Long Beautiful Hair: TANGLED

Disney’s latest animated feature is Tangled, a retelling of the story of Rapunzel, the princess with the incredibly long golden hair. The film’s a straight-up fairy tale, no apologies. It doesn’t feel the need to wink at the audience, distancing itself from the formula for cheap gags or in a bid for elusive contemporary coolness. That kind of hedging and equivocating has infected not just Disney films, but many animated family films in the last decade. There was a rush to learn from Pixar’s example by using computer animation, while overlooking the true strengths of Pixar: sincerity and simple emotion, the same qualities that Disney itself once knew by heart.

With Tangled, Disney finds its way back to its sweet spot, building on last year’s good first step with Princess and the Frog. Their latest film is sweet and charming. It’s not exactly innovating, but it’s fresh and surprisingly powerful. In Dan Fogelman’s script, Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) has been locked in a tower for her entire childhood. The evil Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) has raised her as her daughter after kidnapping the infant princess. You see, Rapunzel’s hair is a fountain of youth. Now, on the precipice of adulthood, Rapunzel yearns to explore the outside world. Of course, for all this time, the king and queen have been searching for their missing daughter. Gothel knows that to let Rapunzel leave the tower would mean to lose youth forever.

The film is filled with rich mother issues. It’s essentially a stand-off between an old view of femininity that tells women to stay locked in a domestic setting, useful only for their physical qualities, and a modern view of women as complete, resourceful individuals of great inherent worth, with talents and insights well worth sharing with the outside world. Rapunzel’s small, personal rebellion against her “mother” consists of secretly cultivating myriad talents. Gothel knows the girl paints, bakes, reads, thinks, and dreams (for starters), but does she know how well? And does she even begin to realize the girl’s potential? She keeps Rapunzel captive by subtly undermining her self-esteem. The film sits on this conflict, deepened by the sense of awful betrayal at the center. Rapunzel has a love for this maternal figure that is painfully sad to us in the audience, aware as we are of the kidnapping.

Dropping into the tower to complicate the plot is Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi), a thief who, by ditching his thuggish partners-in-crime (Ron Perlman), has just barely escaped the royal guards chasing him. To Rapunzel he represents both a novelty and an opportunity. He is the outside world and all the promise and danger that entails. She talks him into escorting her outside the tower, so together they climb down, kicking off a plot that is a well-oiled machine consisting of various overlapping chases. Mother Gothel’s on the hunt for Rapunzel while two groups, both the royal guards and the cheated thugs, are on the trail of Flynn. The film develops into a bright and sunny chase picture with plenty of funny little detours and zippy, exciting action sequences.

It’s never a possibility to forget that it’s a Disney picture, filled as it is with the trappings of the Disney formula, but that’s hardly a burden in this case. Rather than feeling rote, these elements soar by being exceptionally well done. Co-directors Nathan Greno and Byron Howard have made the best animated feature to come out of Disney since 2002’s Lilo and Stitch and the studio's best fairy tale since 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. The animation is a gorgeous, rounded CG style that is a close approximation to the traditional Disney 2D style. (It even uses the new 3D technology to lovely effect). The songs are delightful (if not immediately catchy), the supporting characters are likable, and the animal sidekicks are more than ready for their reaction shots. A goofy little chameleon is surprisingly subdued for a sidekick, with cute, nonverbal expressiveness. Even better is a mute law-enforcement horse that engages in a single-minded pursuit that gallops through the film bringing only hilarious antics.

And, of course, what would a Disney movie be without a romance? The relationship between Flynn and Rapunzel develops with admirable restraint, emerging slowly and cautiously out of the characters themselves. There’s never a sense that she needs a man to rescue her. (If any saving happens in the film, she saves him, or they save each other). Nor is there a sense that the romance is what’s driving her curiosity. She learns that she’s self-sufficient. Her romance develops along with her love of the outside world.

More than the average family film, and certainly more than anything Disney has done in a decade, Tangled packs plenty of emotion into a breezily entertaining romp. It’s pleasantly complicated and surprisingly touching. This is a film of direct, earnestly simple, skillfully playful, and self-assured storytelling that builds (in advance of its very satisfying climax) to one of the most beautiful sequences to hit the big screen all year. It starts with a tear running down a monarch’s face and ends with hundreds of floating lanterns surrounding a pair of potential lovers in a rowboat. It's surprisingly moving sequences like this, especially when they hit with such unexpected force, that make the movies worthwhile.