Just before “The Bourne Legacy” gets its game on, the franchise’s new face, played by Jeremy Renner, comes out of the Alaskan wilderness to take refuge in a cabin. There he meets another of his kind, a superspy with a scowl and enough artillery to invade a small country. By the time they’ve grudgingly warmed up to each other an unmanned drone is blasting everything to bits. It’s an effectively blunt opener for a series that from its start has tracked a different military drone, this one a man fighting to recover first his identity and then his humanity. That you may not remember the name of Mr. Renner’s agent, Aaron Cross, after all the dust finally settles, suggests that the fight goes on.

Less a thrilling franchise reboot than a solid salvage mission, “The Bourne Legacy” is the fourth installment in a series that until now starred Matt Damon as the eponymous spy who, with his near-uncanny wiles, smarts and strength, ran circles around American intelligence agencies and box office rivals both. Superior industrial entertainments, the three previous titles — the first was directed by Doug Liman, the second and third by Paul Greengrass — injected new energy and savvy into American action cinema, which like many of its aging stars had been suffering from blockbuster bloat. The Bourne movies put identifiable human stakes into the action equation, along with a sense of palpable moral outrage, politics and, under Mr. Greengrass’s kinetic watch, increased torque.