After a first film that came out swinging from its opening shot, the sequel gets off to a shakier start. It's a prosaic first act, leaden and workmanlike, with an over-reliance on cliches of the genre. Lots of exposition, news reports about important characters conveniently playing on televisions, Marie staring at couple photos of her and Bourne to show us they're still in love, a scrapbook she leafs through that lets us know Bourne is struggling to regain his memories - there are news clippings of murder stories with annotations next to them like "Was this me?" and "Who am I?" and "Dear diary, I wish I could get my memory back, it's so frustrating how I still get partial flashbacks filled with smash cuts and Dutch angles and odd snatches of dialogue that will probably become important later on."
Bourne and Marie are hiding out in Goa, but shady folks have hired Karl Urban's Russian agent to sabotage a CIA mission helmed by new face of the agency Pamela Landy, a competent and focused professional played perfectly by Joan Allen - and Urban has planted a fingerprint framing Bourne for the sabotage, in which Landy's field agent and his contact are murdered.
Urban then heads to Goa and is spotted by Bourne rather conveniently, and Bourne's spidey-sense starts tingling and he rushes to get Marie and to escape in their Jeep. But Urban is hot on their tail, and cue a car chase that showcases new director Paul Greengrass's approach to action, something that becomes a calling card for the franchise.
It's a combination of shaky cam, quick cutting, and the partial framing of subject, as if the camera is perpetually struggling to keep up with the action. The style has become de rigueur for action movies these days, a cliched technique that is often used as a way for mediocre directors to mask uninteresting content behind chaotic and nausea-inducing filming. Look at something like the fight scenes in the Transformer movies for the worst examples of this.
Yet here the technique still feels fresh, and Greengrass is careful to show us just enough of the set up and each subsequent beat to ensure we get the gist - Urban is racing after Bourne and Marie, Bourne swaps seats with Marie, Marie cuts the Jeep across the fields, Urban is out of his car with his rifle racing to a vantage point - but within each beat the cuts come just too fast, the framing is just too close and claustrophobic, for us to relax within the shots. We get the information, but no time to appreciate or to process. It's breathless, we race onwards, always a brain jolt behind the action - and then Bourne and Marie have escaped, they're driving over the bridge to the mainland, the tension eases, the cuts slow, we get a chance to rest here in the intimacy of the car with the two of them-
-Quick cut back to Urban aiming his sniper rifle - Then cut back to the car-
-and Marie's head is snapped forwards and the Jeep swerves off the bridge and plummets into the river.
So, yes. Bourne's one emotional connection is torn from him, and he is thus motivated to re-enter the world of espionage and conspiracy and busy European cities, seeking retribution for, or at least understanding of, the death of the woman he loved. It's hackneyed, for sure, but it does the job - though only really because the first film worked so hard to build that tenderness between Bourne and Marie, which the sequel then trades in for a pre-packaged burst of pathos. Cheap, yet effective. We as the audience are there with Bourne as he burns Marie's belongings and prepares to go searching for answers.
And from here, through the second and third acts, the film doesn't put a foot wrong. There isn't the character development of the first film, which really was such a brilliant exploration of what it means to take responsibility for your life, to cast off the persona foisted upon you by an external world and to craft a new identity of your own choosing - but what there is instead is a fevered, unrelenting thrill-ride filled with loneliness and isolation and unease, a cat-and-mouse chase where Bourne holds all the skill and determination, yet the wider world embodied by Landy and Brian Cox's section chief Ward Abbott holds the power. Put Bourne in a room with three cops and those cops are going down. But then Bourne has to escape the building, hide from CCTV, dodge checkpoints, avoid monitored areas. Bourne is implacable, but every step he takes draws attention, and the net around him is shrinking.
The scope of the film is wider than the first, its story further reaching, but in the plotting of scenes there's the same care taken over realism, and the same satisfaction in watching Bourne struggle through set-piece after set-piece as the tension inexorably ramps and you wonder when you'll be able to catch your breath.
It's smart, it does have a heart (embodied in Bourne's refusal to take the lives of those who caused the death of Marie, and in the final taking of responsibility for the actions of his past), and it looks superb, replacing the muted low-fi aesthetic of the first film with a lagoonal world of greens and blues, all swanky yet lonesome hotel lobbies, stark interrogation rooms, and rainslicked motorways stretching into the night.
The machine of The Bourne Supremacy's action does take time to get rolling, but once it does it never lets up, and it rolls to such a well-structured conclusion that a third instalment was all but guaranteed.
Let's see what that one was like!
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