3. Malnourished Love Story
While the previous Bourne films had a romantic element, with Jason Bourne ending up with Franka Potente's Marie before she was assassinated, it felt natural, owing to a certain relaxed chemistry between Potente and Matt Damon. While Legacy doesn't go overboard in this respect, it's the desperate insistence to hint at a romantic entanglement between Cross and Shearing that feels needless, with countless shots zooming in on their hands touching, not suggesting a certain emotional closeness given the extreme circumstances, but clearly something more, given that, at the end, they sail off together into the sunset. Though Weisz easily does the best job of anyone in the film, her relationship with Cross is mostly not pitched as a romance, such that the various hand touches seem awkwardly forced and almost laughably manipulative, because studios believe that we
need this in our films, which, of course, we don't.