Review: The Bourne Legacy

When The Bourne Legacy was first announced, expectations were pretty low for the series return minus main star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass: who despite only signing up during the second film The Bourne Supremacy, had become synonymous with the franchise - but in case of the marketing men really earning their money, as each piece of information and trailer leaked out this reboot of sorts started to look like it could be the surprise hit of the summer.

Despite having all the tools in place, The Bourne Legacy never quite clicks meaning it struggles to live up to the standards set before. The film is directed by writer Tony Gilroy with a similar flair for action as Greengrass and Jeremy Renner has much of the believability Matt Damon brought to Bourne as Aaron Cross - but the story so far lets the film down, with too much held back for the sequels leaving a pretty basic plot stretched to breaking point thanks to a run time well over 2 hours, resulting in a final action chase that should be thrilling just ending up a bit boring as you know nothing will be resolved by this point.

The potential is there for a great film, maybe the sequel will see a similar jump in quality like The Bourne Supremacy made from Identity.

Review: Ted

On the surface the premise of Ted, the story of a sweary, stoner teddy bear and his manchild friend sounds like it will struggle to fill a film - but thanks to Seth MacFarlane's proven track record in creating crude comedy characters and Mark Wahlberg once again excelling at playing the idiot, Ted finishes up as one of the funniset comedies of the year.

As you'd expect from the man behind Family Guy and American Dad, the jokes are mostly rude and random - there's just about enough of a plot this time around to ward off any accusation of Ted being written by manatees, but the film is arguably at its weakest in its final third when the jokes slow down and the plot takes precedence - as beneath the jokes its not much more than a pretty basic rom com with a chase stuck in it.

The ability to create chemistry between Wahlberg and a CGI bear is at the core of Ted's success, but there's also strong support from Mila Kunis as John's long-suffering girlfriend alongside Joe McHale making the movie from Community to movies as her sleazy boss Rex - also much like 21 Jump Street, the other comedy hit of the year, the film features an outrageous 80s cameo that comes close to stealing the show.

Review: The Dark Knight Rises

With the hype sky-high after the success of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's third and final installment in the Batman franchise was always going to struggle to match up to people's expectations - but quite how short The Dark Knight Rises falls will be a surprise to many.

The main problem with this final film is that whilst the success of the series has been in its realistic setting of the superhero's story in the modern world, too much of The Dark Knight Rises plot stretches the believability to breaking point, taking the viewer out of the film to question whether what happened actually made any sense.

That's not to say this is a bad film - there's plenty to enjoy in the action set-pieces and the performances of Anne Hathaway and the return to the fore of Christian Bale as The Caped Crusader himself, who is back inform after taking a backseat to performances from Aaron Eckhart and Heath Ledger in the previous film. Tom Hardy is good as his nemesis Bane, playing him more like a Bond villain than you may expect - it would be unfair to compare him to Ledger's Joker as they are very different type of villains, but Bane could've done with a bit more development to show why exactly he has managed to amass a cult-like army of followers.

The Dark Knight Rises also suffers from trying to cram too much stuff into one film - it would arguably have been better following the lead of the final installments of the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises by splitting the story into two parts, as it feels like there is at least 4 hours of film crammed into 2 and 3/4 hours, with several minor characters introduced and subsequently getting lost in the shuffle, leading to some underwhelming moments the should be much more powerful as the film hurdles through several of its multiple endings, of which the final one seems a little bit too much like trying to repeat Nolan's trick from Inception, copping out from the proper ending that actually suited the story.