Let’s do it. Let’s finally go there. No use beating around the bush. We have to do this. No more half measures.
Let’s discuss the Jeremy Renner app.
The Jeremy Renner app lasted for longer than you would think. It was set up in March 2017 to provide a place for avid fans of American actor Jeremy Renner - famous less so for the movie we are covering in this week’s newsletter, and more so for his work as Hawkeye in the Marvel Cinematic Universe - to connect. Not just with each other, but with him. The real guy. The real Jeremy. The man himself would share banal, pleasant posts encouraging users to have a happy Rennsday (Wednesday), and things of that nature.
This was a fully monetisable venture, primarily fuelled by microtransactions known as “stars”. The more stars purchased, the more your posts and comments would be pushed up the algorithm, and the likelier Jeremy is to see them (predicting, mysteriously, the exact methods Elon Musk would use in running Twitter years later).
You may be wondering about the point of a focused app for a particular celebrity, given regular social media pages provide all of these services without the irritating microtransactions. Well, keep wondering.
Darkness and mystery swirled beneath the surface of the Renner app, such as the sketchy nature of its publisher, ESCAPEX, fan controversies about rigged Renner meet and greet contests, and community drama that any forum lurker will recognise. However, it only reached real notoriety in autumn 2019, when a joke post by journalist Stefan Heck unearthed a wave of chaos that would topple the app.
Heck’s post broke the seal. Soon after, users discovered that impersonation was free and easy on the Jeremy Renner app, and outside users swarmed in. Its fate was sealed.
Perhaps it was that last post that finally swept away the last patch of green on this once digital Eden. Perhaps not. In any case, its fate was sealed.
Nothing lasts forever, and we both know hearts can change. It’s hard to hold a candle in the cold November rain.
If this brief précis didn’t sate your appetite for Renner app facts, I am delighted to recommend you The Renner Files, a comprehensive true crime style podcast that unpacks every inch of its rise and fall. I have recommended this app to many friends, and every single one of them has been confused by what I have told them. It’s good.
Welcome to The Bourne Legacy. This newsletter has jumped the shark. Literally.
We’re so back.
Did you think this whole memory concept was stretching thin, reader? Did you think my paragraphs talking around how I don’t remember watching Identity or Supremacy showed I picked the wrong idea to hang a series on?
That’s a rhetorical question. Those are actually my own doubts.
In any case, we are on the firmest of ground now. Looks like memory is back on the menu, boys!
We jump now from some time in the late 2000s to 2012. What a weird year, huh? Between the London Olympics, the Mayan apocalypse thing and the leap year of it all, there just seemed to be something significant in the air in 2012. I think I got that memo, too. For me, 2012 was the year where I seriously got into movies. By which I mean I became an online fanboy posting hard about upcoming blockbusters, rather than some cineaste wunderkid eagerly awaiting the new Abbas Kiroastami or something.
(Stream Like Someone in Love (2012, dir. Abbas Kiroastami) on MUBI now. It’s a banger.)
It felt as if Hollywood has laid itself out at my feet, really. For a 13 year old nerd blissfully unaffected by franchise fatigue, 2012’s slate looked like a feast of delights. The main three in my mind were the trio of superhero blockbusters releasing in the summer: The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises. There were others, too. The first Hunger Games. Men in Black 3, which I was absolutely psyched for despite never having watched the previous films. The first Hobbit, which I was absolutely psyched for despite never having watched the Lord of the Rings films.
I was a baby Letterboxder, okay? I had to earn my posting stripes.
But I couldn’t just subsist on the seemingly endless trailers for The Dark Knight Rises. (There were five of them. Five full trailers. All of them with different mixes of the Bane voice. I was going fucking insane in 2012.) I had to have something I could call my own also. Something which was at least one per cent individual to me. Something which ensured that I wasn’t like all the other fanboys.
Enter Jason Bourne.
Well, not Jason Bourne, actually. Say what you will about the concept of a fourth Bourne movie without Matt Damon, but the marketing was at least honest about it. These days, the entire press circuit would likely be a series of coy winks hinting at a Damon cameo, but the pre-release vibe on Legacy was refreshingly straight-up that this was an Aaron Cross joint now, whoever Aaron Cross was.
I did not mind this one bit. Sure, this Bourne movie may have been Bourne-less, but it was still a Bourne movie, a thing that I recognised and liked. It had been long enough since that bewildering Ultimatum experience circa 2007 that it had already passed into the realm of twinkly nostalgia for me. And like any good uncritical fanboy, I loved having my nostalgia tickled. I was full Matt Ramos for this thing.
(Have we discussed Matt “Supes” Ramos before? If we haven’t, he’s like the Platonic ideal of the online fanboy that increasingly seems like a weird relic in 2023. Most recently, he seems to have developed an interest in the QAnon-adjacent hit Sound of Freedom. More on this story as it develops.)
Bourne was hardly an undiscovered indie - Ultimatum made nearly half a billion - but neither was it The Avengers. It was at least a B-tier blockbuster, and this specific movie was a spin-off with reasonable scepticism attached to it. For 2012 me, that was enough to feel indie.
It’s sort of like Bastille or Two Door Cinema Club, you know? They are objectively very popular bands, but they’re like two clicks off the absolute pop mainstream. They are indie-flavoured in a way you are not inclined to examine deeply when you’re a teenager. They’re just enough to make you feel different, even if they’re not really different in any meaningful way from the mainstream.
While I have no interest in their current output, I have a fondness in my heart for Bastille’s first two albums, which come to my memories as long-lost friends whom I once picked apples with in Papa’s orchard. Their second album, Wild World, was particularly pivotal to my September 2016 experience, and I honestly get enjoyment out of their songs if they pop up on my running playlist these days. They’re fun, and I think it’s okay that the political commentary amounts to “wow isn’t the world crazy”. That really spoke to me at age 17, actually. The world was crazy. That was so true.
Suffice to say, The Bourne Legacy was my movie of summer 2012. The one you wouldn’t get if you didn’t get it. The one that was, a little bit, just for me. I was amped. I was ready. I was actually pissed off that the UK release date was slightly later than the US. Like so.
Sorry, wrong tweet.
I actually don’t think this ended up being the case - from the looks of it, The Bourne Legacy ended up releasing less than a week later in the UK. Nevertheless, you get the gist. Even the prospect of waiting two measly more weeks was serious enough to be described as a bummer.
13 year old Louis didn’t know the pain of A24 refusing to even give Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up a UK release. He didn’t know shit.
We’ll put a pin in memory lane for now. Circle back later.
So. Elephant in the room. This Bourne has no Bourne in it. And I oop.
Ultimatum was noticeably more successful than the previous two, having broken out to reach the seven year old action fan contingent, so obviously they were going to return to the well. Briefly, starting with the hiring of two different writing teams in 2008, there was a little chatter that Damon would return to the fold, but those works were thoroughly spannered the following year when Paul Greengrass walked away from the franchise. Damon, who would be genuinely committed to this Greengrass-centric bro code, followed him soon after.
So, no Bourne. No shakycam man, either. Some would say those are the two main creative forces behind the franchise, and that a Bourne film without them would be folly and a waste. Some would say that. But nobody at Universal would.
By 2010, the train was rolling forward on a Bourne-less Bourne with the hiring of a franchise mainstay to the plate. Tony Gilroy had screenwriting credits on all three previous films, though his contributions to Ultimatum were largely rewritten. That experience may have stung just a little, because Gilroy seemed to relish the chance to write and direct a Bourne-less Bourne.
That’s not Tony Gilroy, but it is a prompt to discuss him.
I have been feeling the need to get these next words off my chest for a year now. Writing this newsletter, in part, has been an exorcism. Guilt has plagued me deeply for ten months now. The only choice is to repent.
See, I was really mean about Tony Gilroy for a long time. All I knew him from was this movie, which I (spoiler alert) did not like very much. When I saw that he had been hired to shepherd the reshoots on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, it confirmed my view of him as a franchise hack, a personality-free journeyman with no vision of his own. This view of him persisted all the way until last year, when the Gilroy-helmed Rogue One spin-off Andor premiered.
Reader, Andor rules. It’s so good. It frankly makes any other Disney+ brand-building exercise, be it Marvel or Star Wars, look like a joke.
Having paid my membership fees for Andor hive, I then took the Internet’s recommendation to check out what is widely considered Gilroy’s magnum opus, his 2007 film Michael Clayton.
(That’s the picture above. Tom Wilkinson and his baguettes. Iconic.)
Michael Clayton is a diamond-plated masterpiece that feels like it perfectly captures the exhausted cynicism of the post-recession era, before the recession had even happened. When it comes to depicting the plight of ordinary people crushed underneath an oppressive system, Tony Gilroy simply never messes.
So, from the bottom of the heart, I’d like to say: Tony, if you’re somehow reading this, I’m sorry. I judged you too harshly. That’s on me. I had to fix my heart to get better.
I don’t perfectly recall everything about my first viewing of The Bourne Legacy in August 2012, but I remember that it felt like a balloon deflating in my face.
It wasn’t that I hated it. I was ready to love this movie, and there was just enough there to reward my faith in the enterprise. It’s just that I was… confused. This wasn’t like the movies I had loved before. This wasn’t as coherent, or emotional, or exciting. Instead of the straight-up, easy to digest mission of Jason Bourne, I was lost in a fog of “chems” and competing government agencies and secret labs. It all seemed a little beyond me - not in the fun way of viewing a story meant for grown-ups that showed a peek of a more exciting world of stories I’d soon be able to get, but more in a “oh, my dad is also confused” manner. 13 year old me was pretty guileless about big movies - I was pretty darn satisfied with Men in Black 3. That this didn’t work was… concerning.
The air went out of my little stan tyres almost instantly. Baffled by the experience, I quickly moved on to other shiny interests. There was a new series of Doctor Who in a few weeks. Skyfall was out soon after, and that would certainly reward my interest. Maybe I had backed the wrong horse here.
My memory of Legacy has become sourer over the years, and not even the disappointment of Jason Bourne made me any more inclined to look kindly on it. I just… didn’t get it. This Bourne-less Bourne was a strange anomaly, if not an affront, in my fond memories of those original three.
Nevertheless, coming up to rewatching it for the first time in eleven years, I was feeling charitable. I’d managed to make a case for 2 Fast 2 Furious and Mission: Impossible III on here. I’d gained a new appreciation for Tony Gilroy’s work. I’d spent a lot of time setting up Jason Bourne as the villain of this entire series. I could learn to love Legacy. I could find something here.
Reader, that didn’t happen. I’ll just cross that off right away. The Bourne Legacy is a car crash. It is a fundamentally misbegotten, misshapen mess. It’s actually just deeply boring. I don’t like it. I will never like it.
It’s difficult to count the ways in which things went wrong here, but they’re evident pretty much from the get-go. Gilroy, to his credit, is totally uninterested in simply rehashing the Jason Bourne story, but that does mean throwing away a story structure that was proven effective and starting entirely from scratch. This sits somewhat oddly with the movie’s insistence on crossing over with Ultimatum at every opportunity, playing out a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern thing through its first half, where we’re seeing all the messy shit that went down in other offices during that movie.
Legacy is both starting from a blank slate and carrying a sackful of continuity baggage. The result is as mixed as those metaphors.
That old-new-old-new mixture, really, is where almost every one of Legacy’s many flaws derives from. It’s both too familiar and too off the beaten track. In the first case, Legacy chooses to spend a lot of time on replicating a part of the original trilogy I’ve singled out for love and praise - the sweaty office politics talk.
This ought to be right in Gilroy’s wheelhouse, but all these scenes serve to do is to make you think about how fun Brian Cox, David Strathairn and Joan Allen were. Making the same error that its successor will make, Legacy casts upwards by finding an A-lister as the principal government villain rather than a character actor/TV drama player. Edward Norton, unfortunately, lacks the juice. The movie feels obligated to spend chunks of screentime on him to justify his presence, but there’s little of the depth or tension provided by the original trilogy’s posse - no real counterweight to him. The decision to make him part of a fictional government agency only deepens the problem, continuing Legacy’s wandering away from any real-world relevancy into nicely compartmentalised made-up boogeymen.
Then there’s the Aaron Cross problem, where Gilroy really exerts himself in distinguishing Legacy from what came before. Aside from the necessary uniting factor of both of them being government assassins, Aaron Cross and Jason Bourne are deliberately set up in very different ways. Most notably, Gilroy jettisons the amnesia angle, having his protagonist remember everything about his past, which means a completely different set-up of motivations from the off. That’s not a bad thing at all - we’ll see next week how keeping everything the same also failed to work out for the franchise - but it does put a lot of onus on the replacement to work out.
It does not.
Instead of the simple, dramatically effective motivation that propels Bourne through three movies, Legacy instead creates this very complicated mythology about medication and physical and cognitive enhancements and live viruses and “locking in” as Cross’ reason to run around the globe. Bless you, Tony, but it’s tough to hang a movie on your protagonist needing to get medication so that he doesn’t become incredibly stupid again. Least of all when your primary way of reminding the audience of this motive is to have the character spend the entire movie muttering about “my chems”.
Even in 2012, I was smelling a rat when Jeremy Renner started talking about chems for the tenth time.
In another case of the too-similar, too-different problem, there’s a conscious attempt to create a new version of the Bourne-Marie dynamic that worked so well in Identity. Rachel Weitz does her best, but there’s nothing meaningful going on in the scenes between “Aaron” and “Marta” (I literally don’t even know these people). It’s all plugged into the plotty conspiracy shenanigans at the movie’s heart, which means all their scenes remind you of the movie’s narrative clutter rather than providing some breathing space from it as Identity’s did. You - me - really just want to see Matt Damon and Franka Potente hanging out in a cafe and being cute again. That was nice.
Elephant, meet room. Sorry to Jeremy Renner, but he’s part of the problem here. The Renner-domination era is usually associated more with his roles in Mission: Impossible and The Avengers, but in both of those, he is in a role that works for the guy - the reporter player/support figure, helping out the larger ensemble.
Here, though, is the centre of the early 2010s Rennerpalooza: a full-throated attempt to give him a franchise where he’s the unequivocal lead. And if you ever needed a good explanation for our current state of Renner-scepticism that isn’t the “You go take your hammer and you go talk to him” line delivery from Avengers: Endgame, then The Bourne Legacy is a good place to go.
Much as it is quite difficult to explain why Matt Damon is such a good fit for the character of Jason Bourne, it’s not easy to sum up why Renner flops as the protagonist here. The best I can explain it is that while Identity frontloaded scenes where Damon could be warm and human and likeable, Legacy skips straight ahead to the stoic blankness of the latter movies. There’s nothing to grab onto here - no real charisma, no real touch of vulnerability. If Renner works as a utility player because his screen presence is undefined enough to make him versatile, then he fails as a protagonist for the same reason: there’s nothing distinctive there. It is ChatGPT action hero stuff.
Lousy. The Bourne Legacy is lousy. I don’t like the way it talks and I don’t like the way it walks. I certainly don’t enjoy the cheeky sequel set-up at the end that ropes David Strathairn and Joan Allen back in to remind us of the more interesting plotlines this movie skipped over in favour of frowny Edward Norton.
Don’t even get me started on the end credits.
What the hell is this shit?
I don’t have a problem with “Extreme Ways (Bourne’s Legacy)”. It’s fine. I think Ultimatum’s gives a little more dramatic excitement, but it’s a nice enough incremental change.
What I do have a problem with is seeing that iconic intro come in over Jeremy Renner’s face. I have a problem that they used this song at all. No. No. They should not have done this. I don’t care that this is a Bourne movie still. That was Jason Bourne’s song. Aaron Cross doesn’t deserve it. You’ll never be him, Aaron. You’ll never be him.
At this point, I’m already on the floor, but then Legacy chooses to insult me further by merging the credits into the final landscape shot of the movie.
Does Tony Gilroy even know how to read? Sorry, but the cut to credits is part of this. It’s the kick that really makes the song work. Overlaying the credits like this is a sign of profound moral weakness. It makes me regret apologising to Tony Gilroy.
Grumpy. I’m grumpy. Thanks a ton, Bourne Legacy.
Still. At least this was the only one with Jeremy Renner in. The next movie shouldn’t make me nearly as grumpy.
Next time: Our final newsletter! Well. Newsletters. You know how it is.
We’re finishing up Jason Bourne and this wholly silly project with - who’d have thunk it - Jason Bourne, in which Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass returned to the fold for one last ride, and it was… okay? Fine? Less than fine? Mediocre? So bland and unimaginative that it KO’d my childhood and single-handedly tossed me into the adult world like a confused baby goat?
For a movie that - and we’ll get into it - ceased to exist circa October 2016, we have a lot to unpack here. We’ll also be checking in on some old friends from Vin Diesel to Tom Cruise to Kraven the Hunter to see how things have developed since we left them.
See you next week for the first part of Jason Bourne. Two-part finale. How fancy.