The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

When Jason Bourne is framed for a CIA operation gone awry, he is forced to resume his former life as a trained assassin to survive.

Director:

 Paul Greengrass.

Writers:

 Robert Ludlum (novel), Tony Gilroy (screenplay).

Stars:

 Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Joan Allen.

Storyline

After escaping from the emotional and physical pain he previously encountered. Jason Bourne and his girlfriend Marie begin a new life as far away as possible. But when an assassination attempt on Bourne goes horribly wrong, Bourne must re-enter the life he wanted to leave behind, in order to find out the truth why they are still after him.

This movie Reviews

A supremacy over the Bond franchise, increasingly. Matt Damon reprises an impressive, convincing delivery of a role well executed the first time around. Dalton's efforts come closest, alas within the insuperable cage of audience/exec. production expectation (and reasonably so, I might add).

The equal star of this picture is the efforts of the director Paul Greengrass. I stumbled on a televised doc-feature of this film a couple of hours ago (the sort of thing that becomes a DVD special feature). Greengrass pints to his work in documentary as a style and means of getting closer to the principal character as he tries to discover (i) who he is and (ii) what the ever-present forces are that cause his mental and occupational Sturm und Drang. It all works - the hand-cam and editing chucks us about and it's exciting trying, visually, to keep up with Bourne's every move. There's next to no CGI (the aforementioned documentary claimed none but I don't think that's possible these days) so the interest stays with the characters and never strays into the peripheral or wantonly spectacular.

The one downside with these production values is that one can get a bit seasick at being in the centre of a fight/chase sequence - I kept wondering why Greengrass doesn't put Bourne's heart rate up on the screen as well for good measure. Anyway, the irony is that this film is a Hollywood studio flick: two preposterously good looking spies (Karl Urban's Russian nemesis to Bourne, Kiril, being the other) engaged in a ripping thriller with a shady baddie and a handful of classy women. So bravo to Universal's production hit-squad for not interfering with the project (i.e. trying to work up non-existent sub plots or pointlessly maintain A-ish-list screen time, etc.). 8/10