The Bourne Legacy works hard to capture the feeling of the first three Bourne movies, using the same music and some of the supporting cast from those films in minor roles. And it mostly succeeds. If you liked the Bourne series before, this is more of the same.

It picks up from a sequence in the previous Bourne Ultimatum and intercuts it with scenes of our new Bourne-like character, well played by Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker). He’s on some kind of survival training mission in Alaska and we soon learn that he and Matt Damon’s Bourne character are only two of the highly trained agents in a top secret government program.

But Edward Norton plays a cold-blooded government bureaucrat given the job of shutting down that program immediately because of fears it will become public. So all these highly trained superagents, with their performance now enhanced by drugs, need to be killed. However, Renner narrowly escapes his planned death, quickly figures out what’s happening and fakes his death.

But he still needs his meds, so he goes after one of the doctors who treated him in the program, played by Rachel Weisz. With Renner’s help, she too narrowly escapes death as part of the program’s shutdown and they work together to escape the clutches of their nasty government overseers.

Once you get past the unbelievability of it all, this is a thrilling movie with lots of action and unlikely stunts. And judging by the ending, Bourne 5 is already in the planning stages.

Rating: four deer out of five

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Alf Cryderman is a Red Deer freelance writer and old movie buff.