Simply Entertaining

Sometimes it’s good to keep it simple. In the days of jaw-dropping, mega-budget, knock-your-socks-off, blow-you-away, over-hyphenate-your-phrases blockbusters like The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises (and in light of their impressive success at the box office), I was starting to wonder if every action film would now be an attempt to top those which preceded it (a feat that Avengers essentially accomplished, and Rises definitely tried to accomplish). After all, this trend had been building for the better part of a decade—look no further than the climax of Pirates of the Caribbean 3, which featured Jack Sparrow dueling a man with a computer-animated octopus head on the mast of a ship that is simultaneously caught in a whirlpool and being attacked by both another ship and a mythical sea beast. And, oh yeah, it’s raining. Is that a run-on sentence? Yes, but only because it describes a run-on scene.

The Avengers would seem the epitome of such excessive filmmaking, but it manages to dodge this bullet (so to speak) with an ensemble of likable characters, the wittiest script since True Grit, and, amidst its super-sized muscles and explosions, a clear purpose and objective in every scene. The viewer’s questions are rarely left unanswered, and every piece of action serves some purpose in telling the story. You can call The Avengers excessive, if you want. But it’s excessive like a good buffet, which is to say extremely satisfying and quite fulfilling every now and then.

But not every movie can be The Avengers. And as Dark Knight Rises demonstrated, in the arena of summer blockbusters, there’s only room for one impending nuclear threat. If audiences are routinely presented with nuclear bombs aimed at Manhattan, the whole prospect will just become sort of blasé. And that, we can agree, is a bad thing—both for movies and national security.

But the fact is, not every action movie can top its predecessors. When makers of such films attempt to “keep up with the Joneses,” the result is a very stale crop of movies. And is there anything worse than being bored by an action movie?

In the aftermath of Avengers and Rises, then, it would seem that the ironic goal of the next big action movie would have to be minimalism. Enter The Bourne Legacy, starring Jeremy Renner (a.k.a. Hawkeye from The Avengers). Legacy is just what the PG-13 action genre needed right now—a simple and direct story that is modest in plot, scale, and action.

The story of Bourne Legacy is very simple: the government is trying to track Renner down, so he has to escape. Along for the ride is the beautiful and apparently ageless Rachel Weisz, who spends 90% of the film gaping like a deer in headlights—but in a very appealing way.

The plot also seems less serious, less seething with anti-waterboarding rage, than its predecessors. Of course, the sinister government officials (a trademark of the Bourne series) are still there, gravely staring at giant video-walls as they always do. But the whole affair seems less like it’s trying to tell us something serious, and more like it’s just trying to give us a fun time. And generally, that’s what we want in a movie.

The scale of Bourne Legacy is simple, as well. Going against the globe-trotting grain of recent films (such as Mission: Impossible 4, another excellent action film co-starring Renner…hmm, noticing a pattern here?), Legacy features only one plane ride. The bulk of the action takes place in Manila, a suitably dusty urban setting for the rooftop gymnastics, fast-paced car-chases, and perfectly-calculated arrivals that are another trademark of the Bourne movies. But the setting is relatively understated.

Most important of all, though, the action is simple. Basically, this movie is the anti-Pirates 3. Its climax is a motorcycle chase. No nukes aimed at the Big Apple. No world-devouring alien approaching from a black hole. Just a bad guy, a good guy, and a pretty woman, weaving through crowded traffic on cycles. It’s a scene that could have appeared on the big screen fifty years ago, and it’s just as effective now as it was then.

It’s nice to see that we haven’t completely lost our ability to enjoy the simple things in life.

Happily,
Joezilla

P.S.: How wonderful it is to see a chaste romance in a Hollywood movie! Once again, Bourne Legacy manages to deliver the goods without overdoing it. Let’s hope this is a trend that catches on. Keep praying, though… ;)