Matt Damon had what many considered a surprise hit the year before last with The Bourne Identity. This hoary old Robert Ludlum spy thriller had already been filmed for TV in 1988, starring Richard Chamberlain, and it doesn’t seem to have been a notable success. But Damon’s version hit big, as they say in Hollywood, and now it’s time for the sequel.
This, too, looks like it will hit big, so there’s every likelihood Bourne will turn into a “franchise” like the other spy who shares his initials, James Bond. A third Bourne novel by Ludlum, The Bourne Ultimatum, is waiting in line, and now there’s a fourth too: Ludlum himself being dead, his heirs have followed the example of the Ian Fleming estate and commissioned someone else (in this case, veteran thriller-writer Eric Lustbader) to write a new book, The Bourne Legacy. So expect Bourne III in a year or two, and Bourne IV a year or two after that.
In the meantime, we have The Bourne Supremacy to be going on with. It begins roughly where The Bourne Identity ended: Bourne is hiding out from the CIA, which trained him to be an inhumanly proficient hit man, then dumped him and later tried to kill him off. First he had to work out who and what he was, though, having been left amnesiac about his own history. He managed, in the first movie, to wipe out most of his pursuers and then vanish.
But now someone’s on his trail again. At the start of The Bourne Supremacy, Bourne is living quietly in Goa with his girlfriend, but he is still troubled by vague memories of his past. A couple of jittery flashbacks (starting with the credits) tell us that he’s got a few shards of memory left, and we are in no doubt that they will have a bearing on what is about to unfold. As it soon does.
Some Russian Mafia types upset a CIA operation and finger Bourne as responsible; meanwhile, they try to wipe him out too. That’s rather illogical — one of the few illogicalities in the plot. Why frame Bourne and then try to do him in? Maybe because alive he’d be able to clear himself? Then again, he’d be unlikely to want to fall into the hands of the CIA once more. But if he were killed by non-CIA forces, wouldn’t that look suspicious? It doesn’t really add up, but things move along so swiftly from there that it doesn’t matter much. Almost before you know it, Bourne’s on the run again, now from both the CIA and the Russian Mafia, fighting them off single-handedly and wreaking his revenge in the process.
The plot zips across the world — if it’s minute 95 it must be Moscow, and so on. Quick overhead shots of these places (with subtitles) establish where we are, and then we’re thrust into busy streets or dark alleyways, or, for that matter, into the ops room of the CIA unit chasing Bourne. The plot is fast; the tonal keynote is grim determination. (This is an entirely humourless movie.)
The camera, in turn, moves as rapidly as the plot. Those who get slightly seasick watching movies made with cameras that can’t keep still should stay away from The Bourne Supremacy. Like Michael Mann’s Collateral, it was shot on digital video, which gives the camera considerable mobility — as well as that all-important touch of hand-held vérité. The director here is Paul Greengrass, who made Bloody Sunday, about the 1979 massacre in Ireland, and he gives The Bourne Supremacy the requisite realistic effect with that endlessly moving camera. It zips hither and yon in a way sure to build tension and a general sense of edginess; even at its stillest it gives the frame a gently pitching motion.
The Bourne Supremacy is a supremely efficient thriller, techno-enhanced to move at speed. In that respect, it’s a fine example of its genre, and is never dull. Damon is good: the idea that Bourne is amnesiac and thus lacking in some of the essential constituents of personality (deep memory, for instance) works in his favour, as does the knowledge that Bourne is a trained killer stripped of feeling. Damon does very little facially and emotionally — and we feel he is being admirably understated, rather than simply blank. Now and again he even manages to get a haunted look to cross his increasingly chiselled countenance.
This is, though, a weirdly passionless (or perhaps themeless) spy thriller. It’s not really about anything — even the revenge motive is underplayed. And Jason Bourne is a “hero” only in the most minimal way: he has no personality, and he stands for nothing but his own survival. As far as big issues go, there are none. The Cold War is over, so the great stand-off between the Soviet Union and the “Free World” is done with; nonetheless, the poles between which the plot moves are still Russia and the United States.
It’s a kind of residual espionage yarn, and yet The Bourne Supremacy is not about the battle between good and evil — the most content-free plot ever, anyway. Nor is it like a James Bond movie that ostensibly focuses on saving the world from total destruction. It is innocent of the effects of the kind of geopolitical forces exercising the minds of presidential candidates (or their handlers) as we speak. It feels like an in-house CIA memorandum — indeed, in one way it is about the CIA turning on itself, but that is little more than a frame, a given. The Bourne Supremacy is a thriller that isn’t about anything except being a thriller. Which is appropriate — like Bourne himself, it’s a mercilessly efficient machine.