Stillbirth.

Rating: 1/10 (12 June 2005)

Few sequels are as good as the original, but this one is really pretty bad, distilling out of the first version everything that was good and simply throwing it away, then adding some stuff that makes it almost impossible to watch..
Take the title. "The Bourne Identity" actually had meaning. There was a question driving the movie -- just who IS this amnesic guy? Even the name "Bourne" added a bit of symbolic weight. This one is called "The Bourne Supremacy." Supremacy in what endeavor? And why supremacy? Why not just superiority? Or even equality? "The Bourne Equality?" I guess not.
No one could fault the performers, who in other environments have been more than adequate. Matt Damon was good as Mister Ripley, and superb as the guilt-ridden junkie in "Courage Under Fire." Joan Allen, as always, projects a curious but appealing mixture of fortitude and femininity. Nobody else in the movie counts for much.
The plot is more or less dismissible. Bourne is set up and then pursued by some corrupt inner circle of CIA officials and Russians. It has something to do with the privatization of Russian oil, but it all boils down to one long chase.
What really dismembers the movie is the direction and the editing. If you can imagine Oliver Stone on meth, you'll get the general picture.
There is, first, a terrible imposition of directorial self display during some scenes. A blurry step-motion murder. A zapped up memory flashback in negative. But that in itself wouldn't be so awful. The problem is that it never stops.
The camera seems to be ataxic. I can't remember a single scene in which it held still. It wobbles pointlessly all over the place or it focuses on some unimportant object like a venetian blind while the action takes place elsewhere, as if the director had been weaned on MTV or one of those TV commercials for a brokerage firm or a toothpaste whitener. ("I was afraid to smile in public until I discovered Dentabrite with Endorphin.") Let me give an example. Jason Bourne is doing some library research. He's reading microfiche of newspaper items in Russian and English and turns up some important information. The camera shows us the articles and the associated photographs -- but it WOBBLES so we can't read anything. There are dozens of ways of giving a viewer the gist of a story without asking him or her to read the details of the article. Erroll Morris showed us one effective way -- just hold the camera on the header. But this aimless wavering is positively irritating.
The editing is equally poor. Every change of scene seems to be a cut, not a dissolve. And the cuts come fast and thick -- say every few seconds. Objects zoom aimlessly in and out of focus. And the director is given to lightning-quick pans, often past unidentifiable dark objects.
If the direction and editing are a major problem during most of the movie, they turn into insurmountable obstacles during action scenes. A furious mano a mano shows us one-second glimpses of a fist here, a foot there, a knife skittering along the floor, a window breaking. The obligatory car chase comes towards the end, with the possible novelty of having been actually filmed in the gray streets and tunnels of Moscow, but the promise is unfulfilled. Each shot lasts a second or so and gives us mostly details -- Bourne's grimace at the wheel of his speeding taxi, a pistol being fired by somebody whose identity we must guess, cars chasing cars chasing cars chasing a car -- the movie should have been called "Chasing Sanbourne." (That was a wretched play on words. Can I take it back?)
You know why the original "Bourne Identity" was above average, at least in my humble opinion? It had a better plot, for one thing. We were as interested as Bourne himself in finding his identity. For another thing, it had a developing relationship between Bourne and the girl (Famke Potente) whose car he hires. For another, there was violence, but it was not done to the viewer. The fights were unexpected, brutal, and staged in such a way that we could follow the events. And finally, the original gave us a chance to breathe between the zaps, an opportunity to learn something about the characters and their situations, about the kinds of music they listen to on a car radio.
All of that -- and more -- is missing from this meretricious attempt to make a few bucks by tapping into the inelastic demand of an audience of viewers whose heads are as empty as their intolerance of boredom is great. I don't mean to cast aspersions on people who may have enjoyed this movie more than I did, just on the people who assembled it with that audience in mind.