The trailer for The Bourne Legacy, the fourth movie of the Bourne series with new star Jeremy Renner and new director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Duplicity), appears below. It’s still called “Bourne,” but Renner plays a new punchy amnesia guy named Aaron Cross (not an unacknowledged actor switcharoo a la Bewitched). If you’re anything like Burnsy, you’re probably super duper excited right now. If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking “More like BORED legacy, am I right?” Seriously though, these movies are like Phil Collins’ keynote address at an oatmeal convention, and they’ve made four of them. I liked the secret-agent-with-amnesia plot better when it was called The Long Kiss Goodnight.

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Jeremy Renner, who’s in the Phillippines shooting The Bourne Legacy, recently took a vacation to Phuket, Thailand, which sounds not particularly relaxing since it ended with his guide getting chopped in the throat with a homemade axe. According to the Phuket Gazette, Renner was in the Rachada Pub with five other people, when his guide dropped a glass on the floor and “became embroiled in an argument,” either because of the glass or independently.

Bar staffs in Thailand apparently don’t F around, because at that point, six guys who worked there pounced on the guide with fists and “a variety of clubs and cutting instruments, including a home-made axe fashioned from a motorcycle brake rotor.”

Oh, we playin’ prison rules? I guess we playin’ prison rules. Their method seems somewhat less refined than the autoerotic asphyxiation ninjas who got David Carradine, but effective nonetheless. The six men are in Thai custody, while the guide is “in hospital with serious wounds to the stomach and partially severed neck tendons.” Though hopefully he learned an important lesson about not bringing an actor to a home-made axe fight.

Renner’s publicist said:

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Tom Cruise vs. The World’s Tallest Phallus

All my life I’d wanted to see Officially Not-Gay Parkour Master Tom Cruise swinging from a giant phallus, and now, thanks to Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, I have! And in glorious IMAX! The plot could’ve used a little more, well… girth, to fully satisfy this lady (*pointing to myself*), but I admit with these wide hips I can be a bit of a size queen. Which is to say, it’s not the kind of story you’re going to remember anything about three seconds after you leave the theater, but as a framework to include every kind of shot you’d see on one of those vivid HD channels that electronic stores use to pimp the latest plasma screens, it’s brilliant. Russian cities! Shiny supercars (all BMW)! Towering skyscrapers! Bollywood parties! …Smooshed together mixed-race titties! If IMAX screens had a demo reel, this would be it. And Tom Cruise is a perfect fit. His blandly competent line readings just scream “movie actor!”

We catch up to Tom Cruise in a Russian prison, where his plucky gang of spy pals, including computer expert Simon Pegg and voluptuous Paula Patton (“Agent Honeypot,” I like to call her) is busting him out. They need his help to catch a terrorist! There’s a former Russian general who’s gone rogue, escaping his pen, goring three of his handlers and stealing the nuclear launch codes. He wants to launch Russian missiles at the United States in order to start World War III, so that, uh… the Earth can, uh… have a fresh start or some shit? You know, it wasn’t super clear on that point. But basically, it’s like War Games or Crimson Tide. If you’ve ever seen that South Park where the characters say stuff like “A secret government program… or maybe it was aliens… Who cares, f*ck you!” to move the plot past the exposition we’re all going to forgive anyway, it’s a lot like that. And rightly so.

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Here’s Gemma Arterton and Jeremy Renner in Entertainment Weekly‘s first look at Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (whose trailer is set to hit this Thursday). Now, if you take this as a serious movie, say, in the vein of Snow White and the Huntsman, a wholly unsatirical film in which Chris Hemsworth plays an axe-wielding medieval swordsman who teaches Snow White (played by Kristen Stewart) “the art of war” so that she might do battle (complete with swords and armor and sh*t) with her enemy the evil queen, it sounds like the stupidest thing ever (and yet telling that it’s still totally believable). However, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters comes from Tommy Wirkola (the guy who directed Død Snø, that movie about the blood-puking Nazi zombies) and Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s production company (Gary Sanchez productions); so I’m going to assume that it’s at least a semi-parody. In which case it’s a brilliant idea. Isn’t it amazing how just making something a satire can turn things around like that? Someone should try it with Billy Bush.

Here’s what Gemma Arterton told EW:

Folktales like this have been told over and over again, changing every time. What’s the constant that your movie picks up?
They resonate with your fears, that’s how these fairy tales worked. They scared you into behaving. This one in particular is about abandonment and being lost and parents leaving you. The heart of it is that these kids grow up to be bloodthirsty witch hunters. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, really. What would Hansel and Gretel be in 15 years time?

Though it’s comedic, deep down it’s about abused kids becoming kind of hyper-responsible?
But it’s also very, very dark, and bloodthirsty and there’s a lot of cursing. It’s kind of got a [Quentin] Tarantino feel, really.

I hope it’s more than a “little” tongue in cheek, but it’s probably good to have the actors taking it seriously anyway. Once those spazzes start hamming it up, it’s just a short, slippery slope to Kenan Thompson-land. I also enjoy that their costumes look like they could’ve just as easily come from Paul WS Anderson’s 3D, steampunk Three Musketeers movie. Is Jeremy Renner wearing… a sundial wrist watch with a big brass cover over it?? Amazing.

“What time is it?”

“DAMN! I don’t know! I can hardly get service with all these trees!”

"Wait, you're what?"

Paramount Pictures U.K. recently invited a group of journalists and people who are easily impressed to a screening of exclusive footage from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol so they could show off all the neat-o cameras that they used. I’m sure many a monocle shattered on the floor that night.

Director Brad Bird boasted that the fourth installment of the watch-Tom-Cruise-sprint-like-a-ninny spy franchise marked the first time that an action film like this had been made for IMAX. Then someone presented him with a shiny new trophy and a whole batch of cookies before crowning him the most amazing man in the world.

Other footage shown included a chase scene amid a desert sandstorm, Cruise’s Hunt character scaling the world’s tallest building in Dubai, the Burj Khalifa building and Cruise and Renner playing opposite Tom Wilkinson as he learns of his mission.

It is set to roll out globally Dec. 26 this year and will be seen in hand-picked large format screens in the U.K. including IMAX, VUE Xtreme, Empire Impact and Cineworld Superscreen from Dec. 21.

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

After the jump, you can check out the extended international trailer for MI4, as it features most of these scenes and then you can high five your bro and have a push-up contest.

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