THE BOURNE SUPREMACY

Poor Jason Bourne (or whatever his name really is). Still suffering from nightmares about a life he cannot remember two years after the events of THE BOURNE IDENTITY, the former CIA Black Ops assassin (Matt Damon) wants nothing more than a peaceful life with his girlfriend Marie (Franka Potente) in a small coastal town from India, figuratively in another world from the espionage game. Alas, someone has other ideas and frames Bourne for a pair of murders in Berlin, causing a CIA operation headed by Pam Landy (Joan Allen) to go awry. While high-ranking CIA officer Ward Abbott (Brian Cox) points Landy at Bourne as the source of her woes, the real assassin (Karl Urban) tries to take out Bourne. The attempt is just effective enough to make Bourne whose killer instincts are far more finely-tuned than his memory very, very angry.

Even more than its predecessor, THE BOURNE SUPREMACY is what might be termed a chase thriller there are some mystery details, but as we can guess the broad strokes of what's going on (the filmmakers don't try hard to conceal the identity of the bad guys), most of the adrenaline here comes from watching the characters literally outmaneuver each other. It's definitely a bracing example of the subgenre. Director Paul Greengrass, responsible for the thoughtful and realistic docudrama BLOODY SUNDAY, keeps the pace at a fast sprint, and Tony Gilroy's screenplay (departing in most respects from Robert Ludlum's novel of the same name) is at all times intelligent.

We are carried along by sheer momentum, but the filmmakers haven't tried to do much to replace IDENTITY's self-discovery aspects with a comparably compelling character riff. The script leaves it almost entirely to the actors to give their characters texture and depth. Damon steps up to the plate admirably, giving us a man who is convincingly troubled by what he suspects about himself and even more disturbed by what he knows for certain. Allen is so good at maintaining a cool, poised front while rippling with submerged anger that we don't doubt for an instant what all of this means to Landy. Cox, returning from the first film, again exudes watchfulness and a sense of weighing the odds and Julia Stiles, also reprising her role, is fine as an office worker once again dragged into a scary situation. Urban is a suitably tough and dangerous customer as Bourne's chief nemesis.

It is a tribute to Greengrass, Gilroy and the actors that THE BOURNE SUPREMACY ultimately does muster up a measure of poignancy. Mostly, it's exciting to watch but doesn't take root in the imagination afterwards.