Somebody Give Greengrass a Steady Camera!

Rating: 7/10 (26 October 2008)

Minus one horrible production decision, "The Bourne Supremacy" would stand above its two peers as the best of the trilogy. The plot holds less relevance to the overall arc of Jason Bourne's life than the other two. It is also, by no small margin, the most complicated and involving of the three. Matt Damon gives his most successful performance. The pacing of the action brings a more even movement to the affair. Unfortunately, a *monstrous* misstep by director Paul Greengrass places ankle weights on "Supremacy" as it tries to run.
Writer Tony Gilroy had to discard most of the plot from Robert Ludlum's novels. Real-life assassin and terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Bourne's main literary antagonist, was apprehended in 1994. He now lives in a French prison, rendering Ludlum's story lines useless. Its replacement for "Supremacy" deals with a leak in CIA money and the resulting cover-up.
Two years after the events of "The Bourne Identity," Jason Bourne (Damon) resides in India with his lady Marie (Franka Potente). After an assassin (Karl Urban) botches an attempt on his life, he assembles all his weapons and phony passports. His next destination is Germany where he seeks his only known contact from the now defunct Treadstone project.
Meanwhile, turbulence abounds at the CIA. Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) prepares to receive documents naming the insider who embezzled 20 million CIA dollars. Both seller and buyer are murdered. Crime techs lift Bourne's fingerprint from the area, so Landy suspects that he may have come out of retirement to hide his involvement in the crime. The two investigate the same case from different ends, and what they unearth will surprise and distress them both.
Chris Cooper played the villain in the first movie, and "The Bourne Supremacy" suffers from his absence. His successor initially appears to be oil billionaire Yuri Gretkov (Karel Roden). It is he who arranged the failed murder of Bourne. He only appears four times, and two of those scenes are quite short. Roden also lacks Cooper's panache. That leaves Karl Urban's killer, who is not intended to be a lively character and is also missing from the center section. Landy is Bourne's primary antagonist, but she is not a villain. As she tirelessly pursues Bourne, she never allows her mind to be locked into her first impressions. Like a good detective, her top priority is finding the truth.
Damon provides compensation. His performance demands the greatest range between heavy sadness and provoking anger. The puzzlement that dominated his feelings in the first movie is gone. We see a far deadlier and single-minded Bourne. He twice bared his teeth in "The Bourne Identity," but that was tame compared to what does here. His interrogation of the defenseless Nicky (an underrated Julia Stiles) introduces a previously unseen nastiness. Nicky's sobbing and pleas for mercy only escalate Bourne's behavior.
At the end, he locates the daughter of a prior victim in order to give her the truth and offer an apology. We see him repeatedly blink back tears for a person he has never met. His voice cracks with grief over his past actions and the reality of seeing the destruction he wrought in her life. Damon plays this scene so well that Bourne's own emotions visibly respond to what he observes in the girl (touchingly played by Oksana Akinshina).
Greengrass' method of shooting the film is a serious detriment. Unlike the movies before and after, the action is evenly spaced. It fits flawlessly with the overall story progression. It is here that Greengrass shakes the camera as if it is his favorite exercise. His earthquake cam jerks harder and faster with each successive scene. Even the still moments have some visual instability. A fight between Bourne and a former colleague (Marton Csokas) is probably the trilogy's best. That verdict is impossible to give because of the trembling cam. It feels like Greengrass is trying to let us see just enough to stimulate our appetites without producing the entire meal.
If the bulk of the movie does not take this too far, the climactic car chase does. A number of crashes occur, and of course the epileptic cam pretends to be in them. A shaking world is different when the person is involved since our brain can make it all palatable. On a screen in front, however, it induces motion sickness. My friend had to close his eyes for much of the car chase. Somebody at the local theater vomited on opening night. Another friend thought of "Cloverfield," which is supposed to look like amateur photography, when I described the convulsion cam. Instances like those make Greengrass look bad.
Greengrass' poor judgment tempted me to withhold a recommendation after my first viewing. It was only until my jaded second that I was able to see all the great qualities this movie has to offer. The Huntington's-diseased cam is not as exasperating on the small screen, so home video is the way to go. If Universal ever re-releases it in theaters, stay away.