Movie Review - The Bourne Supremacy
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2004 / 109 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz
The first time I saw “The Bourne Identity” I had just had my wisdom teeth removed a couple days beforehand. Hence, I was hopped up on painkillers and went in and out of consciousness during the course of the film. I didn’t remember much of it after the credits had rolled and, in the intervening years, I basically decided that the movie was a bore. Why else would I have lapsed into a coma during its running length?
Two weeks ago, at Jones’s apartment, in fact, I watched the film again. It was like seeing it for the first time, since I remembered only sketchy details of my initial viewing. And it, quite frankly, blew me away. How could I have slept through a film so involving, so richly entertaining and thought provoking? How could I have missed a film that was like a Bond movie with all the bullshit nicely drained away? I don’t know, but I now own it on DVD, so I have rectified that mistake, at least.
So it was with some anticipation that I attended “The Bourne Supremacy”. You’ll be happy to know that this time I was fully alert through the entire film. And this film is as intricate as the first and nearly as involving. For the majority of its running length, it’s one of the best spy thrillers ever crafted. But it’s not without a major stumbling block.
But first, let me attend to matters of plot. The plot involves a sabotaged CIA operation that results in the deaths of two CIA agents working under one Pamela Landy (Joan Allen, tough as nails without being melodramatically so). For some reason, retired CIA agent (and amnesia victim) Jason Bourne’s fingerprint is found at the scene of the crime. Pamela becomes very interested in Bourne and the defunct sub-agency that he once worked for (known by the code name of Treadstone). It seems they might have had something to do with a shady Russian oil magnate, as well as the disappearance of twenty million dollars of CIA funds. But once an assassin pays a visit to Jason Bourne, he comes out of retirement to find out what exactly is going on, and why assassins and government agencies are suddenly interested in him.
The film has an edge and an uncanny ability to generate suspense, just the ingredients that have been missing from most of the James Bond catalogue for the past twenty years or so. Bourne is cold, methodical. He makes Bond look like a pansy, in fact. He can handle himself with almost preternatural agility during a fight or a chase, and he’s got more ingenuity than most movie spies. In short, he’s believable. Damon inhabits this role very well. He has a focus and gravity that you may not expect from his youthful good looks. He’s excellent here, one of the few of his generation that could pull this role off so effortlessly (then again, for those paying attention, Damon has been maturing into a magnificent screen presence over the past several years). Then again, the acting is fine across the board in this film from Joan Allen’s businesslike performance to the dark corners of Brian Cox’s Ward Abbot. There’s also some great work by Julia Stiles and Karl Urban. The production design is also noteworthy. Instead of taking place in fancy balls and upper crust social functions, like so many overblown spy films, this one grounds itself in real-world locales: grocery stores and drab apartment buildings, unspectacular hotels and dingy basements, even CIA offices so realistic you can nearly smell the coffee percolating and the warm plastic of computers at work. It’s these details that lend gravity to the events of the film, which helps ground us in the reality and breathless excitement of the moment at hand. They help us relate to the film in a way we might not relate to a more spectacular set of locales and events. Every moment of the film is given just the right amount of intensity to thoroughly hook us, but never so much that it makes the film seem melodramatic. It also deals honestly and intriguingly with themes of identity and revenge and corruption, finding unique spins on these subjects about which I had nearly assumed we knew everything.
However, all is not perfect. The film is hampered by one major problem, and that is that the action sequences are shot and edited at far too quick a pace. They are edited into incoherence, in fact, which is something of a flaw. A nice, rapid action sequence is great, but these go by in a blur, and I’m not even exaggerating. Each sequence seems like it has some amazing things going on it, but what is the point of staging an amazing action scene if you’re going to make it indecipherable with rapid camera movements, camera angles that are too close to the action, and editing that would make even Michael Bay confused. I can appreciate the fact that director Paul Greengrass is trying to create immediacy in these scenes and to let us experience these bewildering moments, as they must appear to the characters involved in the scenes themselves. But I must say the experiment is a failure. The effect of these scenes is simply to confuse and frustrate the viewer, even causing me to have a headache by the time the film had finished.
Yet despite this major qualm, I must admit that “The Bourne Supremacy”, like its predecessor (though not quite as well) puts a refreshing spin and a sense of danger back into the spy genre. These films strip away all the irritating, cheesy ingredients and provide fascinating, character-driven entertainment that actually respects the audience’s brain without sacrificing any of the excitement and adding real-world flavor. If not for the shoddy action editing, “The Bourne Supremacy” might have been a miraculous film. As is, however, it is merely very good.
