"The Bourne Supremacy"

Remember him? Matt Damon is back as everyone's favorite amnesiac former CIA assassin in one of the summer's best films.

By Charles Taylor

Jul 23, 2004 | "The Bourne Supremacy" is such an incredible piece of direction it's a pity the material -- Tony Gilroy's adaptation of Robert Ludlum's novel -- doesn't have the depth to stand up to it. The director, Paul Greengrass, does nothing rote. The plot -- the amnesiac former CIA assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is framed for the murder of CIA agents about to uncover a mole -- is espionage pulp. Greengrass keeps you off-balance throughout. When the fight scenes and car chases arrive, there's no telling, from shot to shot, what we will see next or how we'll see it.

The first movie in this franchise, Doug Liman's 2002 "The Bourne Identity," was notable for not treating its violence as mindless action-movie kicks. It felt like an entertainment made by and for adults. Greengrass goes even further, making the violence hard and pitiless. Working with cinematographer Oliver Wood, Greengrass shoots the fight scenes and chases so close in that we see some moments almost as a blur. The editors, Richard Pearson and Christopher Rouse, break those sequences up into quick jagged shots that key us up and keep us hyper-alert. The world is being broken into bits of information, and we look hard at the screen to take it in.

The approach could have resulted in the usual visual gibberish that defines contemporary action moviemaking. You can always tell what's going on in "The Bourne Supremacy," where characters in a fight or a chase are in relation to one another. Greengrass and his production team make you feel as if you're in the middle of the mayhem with them. The violence isn't divorced from pain. When, in the middle of a car chase, Bourne tries to match what he reads on a map to an exit sign zooming by, we see the sign as a shaky indecipherable mass -- we might be looking at some abstract video project.

Toward the end of the film there's a car chase through the streets of Moscow. If you've never been in a car crash, I hope watching this scene is the closest you ever come. It's close enough. How can there even be such a thing as a car chase worth watching at this point in the movies? But the sudden shots of cars looming up towards the camera to smash the small taxi Bourne is driving, the shots of cars forcing their way through spaces that look no bigger than slivers, leave you feeling very unprotected. "The Bourne Supremacy" has been made to puncture the detached delectation of thrills that is usually the only thing required of us at action movies. Greengrass returns espionage fiction to one of its honorable functions, making it a barometer of our sense of violence in the world.

In "The Bourne Identity" it often felt as if we were watching the movie from inside Franka Potente's skin. As Marie, the student who helps Bourne and winds up running for her life, Potente presented the camera with a face so open that it provided her with no protection from the violence she was seeing -- not just for the first time, but up close. She returns briefly here, and though the focus is on Damon, Potente is one of a trio of actresses who damn near bring the movie to a halt when they appear.

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