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The Bourne Supremacy Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for violence and intense action, and for brief language) Theater release: July 23, 2004 by Universal Pictures Directed by: Paul Greengrass Runtime: 1 hour 48 minutes Cast: Matt Damon (Jason Bourne), Franka Potente (Marie), Brian Cox (Ward Abbott), Julia Stiles (Nicky), Karl Urban (Kirill), Gabriel Mann (Danny Zorn), Joan Allen (Pamela Landy) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

If we forget The Chronicles of Riddick—and odds are you had until I mentioned it just now—this is turning out to be a good summer for sequels, from big-budget blockbusters like Spider-Man 2 to small art-house films like Before Sunset. Somewhere between the sensibilities of those two flicks lies The Bourne Supremacy, an intelligent, action-packed thrill ride which also has the documentary-like feel of a European travelogue. Unlike, say, the James Bond films, which are loaded with product placements and pyrotechnics, and which gravitate toward famous tourist attractions like the Millennium Dome and the Eiffel Tower, the Jason Bourne movies are filmed in a more naturalistic style, and are grounded in more mundane yet familiar locations—train stations, hotels, and housing projects that are believable precisely because they don't seem to have been dressed up for a movie.

Matt Damon and Franka Potente on the run

Matt Damon returns as Jason Bourne, the amnesia victim who discovered, two years ago in The Bourne Identity, that he was, until his memory blanked out, a highly-trained assassin working for an ultra-shadowy branch of the CIA. When last we saw him, that branch had been shut down and his boss (Chris Cooper) bumped off, and Bourne himself had turned his back on his former life and settled down to a life "off the grid" with Marie (Franka Potente), the German woman who not only helped him stay one step ahead of his former colleagues but also humanized him, making him less of a killing machine and more of a person.

Alas, any chance of a happy-ever-after is ruined when a Russian assassin named Kirill (The Lord of the Rings' Karl Urban) begins killing CIA operatives and leaving clues behind, including fake fingerprints, that point to Bourne. This prompts a nasty turf war between Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), the tough, focused, no-nonsense CIA director whose men were killed by Kirill, and Ward Abbott (Allen's Manhunter co-star Brian Cox), the higher-ranking CIA boss who was once responsible for the Bourne file. Kirill also tracks Bourne down and tries to kill him, too, to keep the CIA chasing a phantom—and Bourne, who survives the attack but has no idea who Kirill is, assumes the CIA is out to get him again.

Thus begins a game of cat-and-mouse—or, rather, cat-and-cats—in which Bourne comes after the CIA bigwigs while they try to outwit him and quarrel amongst themselves over how to best deal with him when they find him. Landy wants to capture Bourne and take him alive, to complete the mission that Kirill interrupted. But Abbott would be quite happy to just kill Bourne and cut the Agency's losses before any more damage is done.

Brian Cox as Ward Abbott

The film, adapted from the Robert Ludlum novel by director Paul Greengrass (whose docudrama Bloody Sunday had a similarly effective cinema verité style) and writer Tony Gilroy, is to some degree little more than a series of chase sequences and fight scenes strung together with bits of conversation that serve mostly to further the plot; this film is certainly not meant to be a penetrating character study or a thought-provoking theme piece. But the filmmakers know just how to milk the most minimal of details for effect; the dialogue crackles with good lines, while Oliver Wood's naturalistic, hand-held camera-work gives the film a you-are-there intimacy and Christopher Rouse's fluid editing underscores the frenetic, chaotic nature of the film's most intense chases and fight scenes.

There is, indeed, something rather moral about this film's approach to violence that puts it several notches above such gratuitously indulgent films as, oh, say, Bad Boys II. Bourne probably spends more time running away from the authorities than getting into fights, and on the rare occasion that he has to knock someone out, he does it so quickly, with moves so lightning-fast, that you'd almost miss them if you blinked; consistent with this film's naturalistic style, there are none of the slow-motion shots that celebrate the violence in lesser movies. The only drawn-out fights are between Bourne and his equals, and there is a rough, desperate, seemingly improvised quality to their scraps that somehow never feels sensationalistic even as it gives the audience a vicarious thrill; this is true whether Bourne is fighting hand-to-hand or butting bumpers with another man's vehicle in a crowded tunnel, a sequence so wild, so crazy, so physical, so seemingly dangerous for cast and crew alike that it puts the airy, computer-generated tunnel chase in I, Robot completely to shame.

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