A Refreshingly Intelligent Spy Thriller

Rating: Null/10 (3 August 2004)

Like the first film, The Bourne Supremacy is a refreshingly intelligent spy thriller. It succeeds on several levels:
1. It is, indeed, suspenseful, as any spy thriller should be, making liberal use of high-speed editing for high-speed car chases and the like. Often the viewer cannot even tell what the hell is going on in a vortex of flying glass or swirling blows, but the effect is visceral and engaging, rather than confusing. The director frequently opts for the shaky, hand-held camera style, which has become an annoying gimmick of filmmakers in the past decade, but which is used to a wonderfully unsettling effect in this movie, making the mundane seem dangerous, and giving tense moments an air of paranoia.
2. It must be said that Matt Damon is spectacular in this role. He combines the believably square-jawed, high-gear intensity of a special forces operative with the innocent, good-natured, and confused expressions of a young man lost in a world beyond his ken. He plays this conflict out in a number of ways, but throughout The Bourne Supremacy the achievement of cross-current acting-- the hardened shell of one man on the outside, the terror and moral qualms of another man on the inside-- is stupendous.

3. Like the first film, this movie is a political allegory that, despite some of its more obvious political trappings, remains surprisingly subtle for a Hollywood film. Both Bourne movies are about an American who wakes up, as if from a sleep or stupor, to ask, Who am I? What have I become? What have I done? Why am I killing people in foreign countries, and what happened to the notion of truth, justice, and the American way? If Memento was an existential metaphor, this is a movie about national identity, and its timing cannot be accidental. However, the second film takes these ideas a step further. Our hero is trying to seek out the truth: Is someone high up in the government, someone we should be able to trust, using his privileges to kill people for personal oil profits? Sound familiar? In fact, at a key moment, when the CIA is about to silence our truth-seeker, he is protected by a sea of war protestors. Yet despite the film's political boldness, it always remains subtle, avoiding both clumsy preachiness and the inevitable backlash that would come if it were too overt. In this sense, the film's final lines about the value of seeking out the truth are particularly interesting.
The Bourne Supremacy is not a masterpiece, but it is a great film in many respects. Just don't go to hear the Russian language spoken naturally!

8.5 out of 10