The Bourne Supremacy

Two years ago, in ‘The Bourne Identity’, black-ops CIA assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) was pulled from the Mediterranean with amnesia and a brace of bullets in the back, ready to exact his revenge on those responsible. Now living in anonymity in a beach hut in Goa with his German girlfriend (Franka Potente), he’s dragged back into the spy game when a hit man (Karl Urban) working for a Russian oil tycoon tracks him to India, having framed him for two CIA-related murders in Berlin. Plagued by bad dreams and a troubled memory, Bourne hotfoots it to Berlin via Naples and Munich (the transcontinental plot flits around Europe like a dervish), convinced his old bosses are out to get him, vowing to take them down. Pity, then, those trying to stop him: Joan Allen’s incoming CIA chief and Brian Cox’s returning agency operative.

In his Hollywood debut, ‘Bloody Sunday’ director and acclaimed documentarian Greengrass proves himself equally adept at action, building on the edginess of Doug Liman’s original with a feverish handheld camera and frenetic editing which lend the film – even more loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s source material than before – an urgency and a ferocious realism in keeping with the book’s (if not the film’s) cold war-setting and the solemnity of Damon’s ever resourceful Bourne. More Batman than Bond, he can improvise with a rolled up magazine in hand-to-hand combat, and has unparalleled linguistic and fighting skills. Thankfully, he’s the good guy, a singular killing machine we can feel for. Like Bourne himself, this is clinically ruthless in approach: a relentlessly paced, non-stop chase movie that culminates in a breathless foot and car pursuit across a frozen Moscow. The ending sets up a third. On the strength of this, it would be most welcome.