‘Bourne Supremacy’ thrills again
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, July 22, 2004
Two years ago, “The Bourne Identity” breathed new life into the spy-movie genre, giving a clean, hip twist to the world of assassins and agents.
Matt Damon played a CIA-trained operative who has complete amnesia at the beginning of the story, and must piece together his life. What he finds isn’t too savory.
He dropped out of sight at the end of that picture, along with his German girlfriend (Franka Potente). As “The Bourne Supremacy” opens, the couple is in the seacoast town of Goa, India, laying low.
An assassin (Karl Urban) arrives, kills the girlfriend, and brings Jason Bourne (or whatever his name might be) back into the game. At the same time, somebody’s framed Bourne for a hit in Berlin, and the CIA wants him at all costs.
Most of the picture is cat-and-mouse stuff, played out in Berlin and Moscow. Like the first movie, Bourne’s ingenious moves are tracked by CIA guys (and once again, the jabbering into headphones and tapping at computer keyboards is the corniest part of the picture).
Some of the CIA agents are played by actors returning to their roles: Brian Cox, Julia Stiles, Gabriel Mann. This time the team is headed by Joan Allen, who makes a nice adversary for Damon’s Bourne: equally sleek, equally flinty. It’s hard to tell which is cat, and which is mouse.
The first film had a great hook, which was Bourne’s complete ground-zero ignorance of himself. “Supremacy” can’t match that, but screenwriter Tony Gilroy, working very freely from the Robert Ludlam novel, has created a potentially interesting double-narrative device.
On the one hand, Bourne is trying to stay alive and get the people who killed his girlfriend. On the other hand, he’s also piecing together a dark incident from his own past as an assassin, that has been almost – but not quite – erased from his brain.
British director Paul Greengrass, who had a critical success with “Bloody Sunday,” takes the nervous, handheld, jittery approach to shooting this story. I find this style arbitrary and distracting, and the best scenes are those in which the story quiets down long enough for us to study the behavior of the lead characters.
The sequel also lacks the furtive sense of humor that director Doug Liman brought to “Bourne Identity.” Overall, it’s not as fresh or as breathless as the first film.
But it clips right along, and a couple of deft chase sequences, especially a real jaw-dropper through the streets of Moscow, bring up the energy level.
I like the fact that the Bourne pictures are closer to “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” than the 007 series. The spy game doesn’t look very glamorous here, and that’s surely as it should be.
ABOVE: Joan Allen is a CIA chief in “The Bourne Supremacy.”
RIGHT: Matt Damon stars in “The Bourne Supremacy.”
“The Bourne Supremacy” HHH
Sequel to the 2002 hit: Matt Damon returns as the amnesiac spy Jason Bourne. It’s a cat-and-mouse game with Bourne and his former CIA comrades, with less freshness than the first film but still some hard, deglamorized moments.
Rated: PG-13 rating is for violence, language.
Now showing: tk
“The Bourne Supremacy” HHH
Sequel to the 2002 hit: Matt Damon returns as the amnesiac spy Jason Bourne. It’s a cat-and-mouse game with Bourne and his former CIA comrades, with less freshness than the first film but still some hard, deglamorized moments.
Rated: PG-13 rating is for violence, language.
Now showing: Everett 9, Galaxy, Grand, Marysville, Mountlake, Stanwood, Meridian, Metro, Oak Tree, Woodinville, Cascade, Oak Harbor Plaza.
Robert Horton
