Bourne Gets His Revenge by Staying One Step Ahead

The Bourne Supremacy opens on a man who has stopped running. Jason Bourne, played again by Matt Damon, is living in exile in Goa with Marie Kreutz (Franka Potente), two years after the events in Paris. He keeps a notebook of flashbacks, still trying to assemble the life he lost to psychogenic amnesia. He promised retaliation if anyone from his former life made contact. Someone does.

Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.

A $3 Million Deal in Berlin

The film’s engine starts in Berlin, not with Bourne. A CIA agent working for Deputy Director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) is paying $3 million to an unnamed Russian source for the Neski files — documents covering the theft of $20 million seven years earlier. Kirill (Karl Urban), an agent of the Russian Federal Security Service working for the oligarch Yuri Gretkov, interrupts the exchange. He kills the agent and the source, takes the files and the money, and plants fingerprints that frame Bourne for the attack.

The frame is the whole machine. Landy finds Bourne’s fingerprint and asks Section Chief Ward Abbott (Brian Cox) about Operation Treadstone, the defunct CIA program Bourne belonged to. She tells Abbott the agent who stole the $20 million is named in the Neski files. Russian politician Vladimir Neski was about to identify the thief when his wife killed him in a suspected murder-suicide in Berlin. Landy believes Bourne and Treadstone’s late supervisor, Alexander Conklin, were involved — and that Bourne killed the Neskis. Chris Cooper returns as Conklin in an uncredited flashback.

Kirill Goes to Goa

Gretkov sends Kirill to Goa to kill Bourne. Bourne flees with Marie. Kirill follows and kills her, unaware that the two had switched seats during the chase. The mistake is the hinge the rest of the film swings on.

Bourne leaves Goa for Naples, where he lets security identify him on purpose. He subdues a Diplomatic Security agent and copies the SIM card from the man’s cell phone. The call that follows tells him about Landy and the frame. Then he goes to Munich to see Jarda (Marton Csokas), the only other Treadstone operative still alive. Jarda tells him Treadstone was shut down after Conklin’s death, then attacks him. Bourne strangles him to death.

Greengrass Takes the Chair

Paul Greengrass replaced Doug Liman as director after the producers saw his work on Bloody Sunday (2002). Tony Gilroy wrote the screenplay, loosely based on the novel and a sequel to The Bourne Identity (2002). The film premiered at ArcLight Hollywood on July 15, 2004, and Universal Pictures released it in the United States on July 23. It runs 108 minutes and carries the tagline “They should have left him alone.”

The cast is deep in a way the first film’s was not. Gabriel Mann returns as Danny Zorn. Julia Stiles returns as Nicky Parsons. Tom Gallop plays Tom Cronin, John Bedford Lloyd plays Teddy, Ethan Sandler plays Kurt, and Michelle Monaghan plays Kim.

Here is the release and reception record:

What the Handheld Camera Is For

Greengrass’s camera shakes, and the cutting is fast, and the fight scenes are built to be felt rather than admired. That choice has been copied so relentlessly in the 22 years since that it now reads as house style for the whole genre. Watch the Munich sequence — Bourne against Jarda in a tight apartment, then a run across rooftops and through glass — and the intent is plain. The audience is not meant to sit above the action and score it. The audience is meant to be inside it, unsure where the next blow comes from.

That approach costs something. When the camera will not hold still, geography gets lost, and a fight between two men in one room can turn into a smear. The Bourne Supremacy mostly pays for the tradeoff because the stakes are personal and the confusion is the point. Bourne does not know who he is. The film refuses to hand the viewer a clean map of a life its own subject cannot see.

Damon is the reason it holds. He plays Bourne as a man doing arithmetic in his head at all times — distance, exits, threat. There is very little talk in him. When he does speak, it lands.

Allen and Cox Carry the Other Half

The CIA material could have been dead weight. It is not, because Joan Allen plays Landy as a professional who follows the evidence and does not enjoy where it leads, and because Brian Cox plays Abbott as a man who has already decided what the truth is worth. Their scenes together are the film’s quiet counterweight to all the running.

The plot is a conspiracy of documents and money, and the film never pretends otherwise. The Neski files, the $20 million, the frame — these are the mechanics that put a killer in a seaside village and take a woman’s life. The Bourne Supremacy is not interested in whether the CIA is good or bad. It is interested in what happens when an institution decides a man is a loose end and the man turns out to be very hard to tie off.

What dates the film is its own influence. The shaky-cam action thriller became a default setting, and later entries in this series pushed the same tools harder, so the original can look almost restrained by comparison. What does not date is the structure: a man who wants to be left alone is dragged back by people who should have known better, and every choice he makes after that is a consequence of theirs.

The score is 7.3/10.

2004 film · Jason Bourne · Matt Damon · movie review · Paul Greengrass · The Bourne Supremacy