A Sad Step Down

Rating: 6/10 (26 April 2007)

The first film in this series was awesome. Bourne was sympathetic, Franka Potente was wonderful and the baddies were really easy to hate. Full marks for all that, so what went wrong? the film starts out with a flashback, Bourne remembering a job he did in Berlin while he was with the clandestine hit squad, Treadstone. Bourne has gone off the grid, living in various third world countries with his girlfriend. the plot kicks off when a high level CIA purchase in Berlin is swindled, both the client and buyer killed, and Bourne's fingerprints are all over it. before long, Bourne comes under fire in Goa, India from the same man who did the killing in Berlin. following the loss of his girlfriend in the attack, Bourne swears vengeance, and heads off to Europe.
One off the best things about Identity was its ability to make the audience care about Bourne, he's a nice guy, he's human. In this one, he might as well be the terminator. We see Bourne as his enemies must have seen him before his amnesia: cold, heartless, pitiless. He behaves more like a villain, keeping us at an emotional distance.
If you've ever read a Tom Clancy novel, you'll work out the plot about 4 minutes after meeting the bad guys. and with Bourne acting like a kill-bot for the whole movie, the film has neither a complex plot nor an emotional core. We stop sympathizing with his rampage of revenge after he stops letting us.
The climax, a wild, slick car chase through Moscow is objectively great. but by this point in the story, with the main nasty bloke sorted out, we don't even know what Bourne's doing in Russia. and so this extended action set piece is wasted on an audience who haven't been told what's going on. the quiet character scene that follows where Bourne reveals the truth about the death of a young girl's parents to her should have preceded the car chase.
none the less, the whole movie is slick, but it lacks the emotional centre and clear objective of the first. while clear objectives don't always work (they can be detrimental in a lot of films) this is a thriller, and if we don't know where the hero is going, and he's a jerk, we don't care