The Bourne Disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (19 December 2004)

The Bourne Supremacy suffers from too much preoccupation with being "stylish" to be entertaining. Too many attempts to be "cool" kept pulling me away from the story and back to reality, where I had to face the sorry fact that I was watching a bad movie.
You'd think by now Hollywood would figure out that the "shaky camera" bit is old, and that it was a dumb idea to begin with. Director Paul Greengrass explains in the features that the shaky camera was intended to evoke a "visceral" response from the viewer. But then again he'd have to say *something* to explain how such an expensive film could look so awful. I suppose the poor lighting had some artistic purpose also. Maybe I'm just not cool enough, but I would have preferred to be able to see what was going on instead. Most silent films had better lighting than this one.
The technology gimmicks in the film were embarrassing to watch: computers that instantly call up every piece of information that exists in the world (at high resolution), two or three CIA voyeurs who can identify Jason Bourne on security cameras out of 200 million Europeans passing by, the rapid-fire typing of a court stenographer in the soundtrack every time someone is sitting at a computer. Hey Greengrass: if you want "visceral" reality, why don't you show the CIA sitting around watching the Windows hourglass on their monitors, or rebooting their computers every five minutes? The portrayal of high technology in this film wasn't interesting or entertaining at all. It was just plain silly.
As near as I could tell there was a good car chase going on somewhere in the background while the camera was busy shaking and spinning around, not focusing on anything in particular. The only thing I recall about it was a motorcycle sliding rather gently beneath a car, but I'm not sure whether this had anything to do with Bourne, the story, or anything else. The editing was that bad (or was it "visceral"?).
The good news is Matt Damon and Julia Stiles' performances--especially when Stile's character fears for her life. Unfortunately, their efforts were wasted on this film due to the shaky-cam, bad lighting, and poor editing. Joan Allen's character was a Royal b*tch, so if you like that kind of thing, there you go. Otherwise, she'll probably just p*ss you off. And don't expect a whole lot of action in this film. There's a lot of *movement* due to the shaky camera, but very little action for an action film. And Damon himself has about as many action scenes as Walter Matthou did in Grumpy Old Men, unless you consider walking down the street quickly to be an action sequence.
Finally, each DVD special feature ends with a brief advertisement for... the DVD you are already watching. Are the filmmaker's really that sloppy, or was this too meant to evoke some kind of "visceral" reaction? If so, they succeeded, because I feel sick after watching this film. It is nowhere near as good as the Bourne Identity.
4/10