The action heroes of the 21st century have the option of being David and not Goliath. They're a compact ball of energy, a clenched fist, a meteor with a low centre of gravity, darting and zipping, not rumbling and thundering. I've grown up watching Eastwood, Stallone, Willis, Schwarzenegger; but the current generation of multiplex-goers, besides the usual slab of pen-fed meat like Jason Statham or Daniel Craig, also have the choice of skinny Tobey Maguire as Spidey, little James McAvoy as one of the X-men, and of course, Matt Damon, dense and crackling, as the man with no memory, Jason Bourne.
With his character's name ablaze on the marquee, Damon is absent in The Bourne Legacy, and we have here what seems like his natural heir.
Jeremy Renner, best-known as the thrill-addicted bomb defuser in The Hurt Locker and as Hawkeye in The Avengers _ and perhaps a high-profile brawl in a Phuket bar last year while taking a break from filming this movie in the Philippines _ fills in Damon's shoes with relish, and better yet, with integrity.
Bourne is a tormented spirit, a killer looking for a home, and Renner, playing Aaron Cross, another homeless spy from the same secret cradle as Bourne, comes across in many scenes as a real lost soul, rawer, less polished, and more working-class than Damon.
Director Tony Gilroy, meanwhile, takes over from Paul Greengrass, who helped formulate a new visual language for action films through his deft use of handheld camera and spatial economy in the Bourne trilogy.
Gilroy co-wrote the screenplays of all the previous Bourne movies, so he knows his players inside out, and he's familiar with the cavernous layers of government conspiracy and CIA cynicism that give Robert Ludlum's source novels such vibe and intricacy. As a director, Gilroy is more deliberate and composed than Greengrass, and yet he also knows that the burst of violence and mayhem is the legacy of the franchise.
Since Bourne has slipped through their fingers, the CIA clean-up ops led by Eric Byer (Edward Norton) set out to whack all the remaining spies from the Treadstone project, a clandestine operation that uses biochemistry and genetic manipulation to groom perfect killers _ a network of Frankenstein assassins (mostly good-looking anyway).
Cross, like Bourne before him, has to run. And like his predecessor, Cross has a woman in tow, virologist Marta (Rachel Weisz). And like the Bourne films before, there's a long chase that takes place in a third-world city, Manila here, crawling with humanity and faceless crowds. Of course, a Jeepnie is wrecked and seedy alleys running amok. Perhaps the idea is that squalor and poverty can heighten the evil of the CIA. Yet Cross is too busy saving his life than to feel existential angst like Bourne did _ but I bet that will come in the next movies.
It's clear from The Hurt Locker that Renner is bottled energy; in The Bourne Legacy the man is uncorked in several occasions after the lengthy spell of calm and the silent threat of the opening. He doesn't do that much hand-to-hand combat, because as in other Bourne films, the real villain is not megalomaniac thugs that need to be wrestled down, but the tyrannical system of his own government that has to be endured and outsmarted.
The Bourne Legacy may not have the fresh spark of its preceding trilogy _ Gilroy is obviously going for a more sombre tone _ but Renner is full of what small action heroes count as asset: spunk. Size does matter, and lately, it means the smaller, the better. We'll be seeing this guy for a long time.
