by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Bourne Supremacy, second in the cycle of Jason Bourne films made by
Universal in association with the usual polyglot assortment of special-purpose
production companies: Motion Picture THETA Produktiongesellschaft, the
Kennedy/Marshall Company, Ludlum Entertainment and Hypnotic. It was released in
2004, two years after The Bourne Identity, and featured the same star, Matt Damon, as Jason Bourne (though at
the end of this episode it’s revealed that his true name is David Webb and he
was born April 15, 1971 in Missouri), who at the start of The Bourne
Identity found himself being rescued from a
near-certain drowning in the Mediterranean Sea with no idea what his name is,
what he does for a living or anything else — until circumstances, including the
discovery of the number for a secret Swiss bank account stored on his person,
put him in the center of various international intrigues and let him know that
at least in his “Bourne identity” he’s a contract killer for Treadstone, an
unauthorized program within the CIA that takes out various people, including
national leaders, whose continued existence could be inconvenient for the U.S.
in general or the CIA in particular. The character of Jason Bourne was created
in the 1980’s by pop thriller writer Robert Ludlum, and was brought to the
screen for the first time in a 1988 TV-movie with Richard Chamberlain as Bourne
and a plot line that (at least according to various imdb.com posters) stuck far
closer to Ludlum’s novel (which I’ve never actually read) than the 2002 film
with Damon.
Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote the script for the 2002 Bourne
Identity with William Blake Heron, got sole
screenwriting credit for this one and said he wanted to do a “re-imagining” of
Ludlum’s novel rather than a direct adaptation. What that appears to have meant
is Gilroy basically threw out Ludlum’s plot and wrote his own, though he
shoehorned in whatever incidents and situations from Ludlum’s original would
work in telling his own tale. At the last minute Universal brought in another
screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, to do a full rewrite, and though they didn’t
officially use Helgeland’s script the director, Paul Greengrass, substituted a
lot of Helgeland’s scenes for Gilroy’s during the actual shoot. Having watched
other movies involving Tony Gilroy — including the two films he’s directed,
Michael Clayton (2007) and Duplicity (2009) — I suspect that what Greengrass wanted from
Helgeland’s script that he wasn’t getting from Gilroy’s was plot coherence and
cutting down the number of reversals so the final film would make sense. Also,
unlike the various James Bond films — which were more like old-fashioned TV
series episodes which each told a self-contained story with just key
characters, not plots or situations, carrying over — The Bourne
Supremacy is a direct sequel to The
Bourne Identity. It begins in Goa, India,
where Jason Bourne and his lover Marie (Franka Potente, who gets second billing
to Damon even though she’s killed in the first 15 minutes — aw, c’mon, was that
really that much of a surprise?)
are hiding out in hopes of living a life together under the radar and avoiding
the attentions of the bad guys, both inside and outside the CIA, who want to
kill him. Unfortunately, Bourne spots a car and its driver that look out of place
in Goa, and he correctly reasons that someone has traced him and sent a hired assassin to take him
out, and there’s a car chase (indeed the entire movie is basically a series of
car chases!) in which Bourne and Marie attempt to outrun a modern Western sedan
in one of those little Indian personal vehicles. They’re ultimately forced off
a bridge (another recurring motif
in the film) and, because he had her switch places with him and take over the
wheel while their car was moving, she takes the bullet meant for him and
there’s an oddly romantic scene between the two of them underwater before
Bourne is able to save himself but unable to rescue her.
Bourne immediately
goes off on a worldwide chase involving such locations as Berlin, Germany and
Amsterdam, The Netherlands (the name of the country each city is in is clearly
specified in the subtitles, as if the filmmakers were assuming American movie
audiences are so geographically illiterate they need that extra information;
Charles and I still get a kick ouf of the title in Mission:
Impossible III which identified a key
sequence as taking place in “Shanghai, China”!), and he’s chased throughout by
a dedicated but honest woman CIA agent named Pamela Landy (Joan Allen, who
delivers the film’s best performance; powerful and authoritative, she puts Matt
Damon to shame where acting chops are concerned, which isn’t that big a
surprise), who’s out to kill Bourne because the information she’s received is
that he’s a rogue agent who’s already killed two people in Berlin, and because
an attempt to plant two bombs to blow up part of Berlin’s electrical system
(which failed when one of the bombs didn’t go off) reveals Bourne’s
fingerprints on the dud bomb. (Later we’re asked to believe the prints were
faked, but we’re never told how.) There are periodic flashbacks showing Bourne
being trained by the former head of Treadstone, Conklin (Chris Cooper,
uncredited), who was killed at the end of The Bourne Identity but reappears here as a sort of ghost haunting
Bourne’s memories. The flashbacks show Bourne being sent on his first killing
assignment: to knock off Neski, a reform-minded member of Russia’s parliament
who wants to take on the corrupt oligarchs who grabbed control of Russia’s
energy industry when the Soviet Union was falling apart and its state-owned
enterprises were being subjected to fire-sale privatizations. (The use of
Russian oligarchs as villains in this film dates it — the power of the
oligarchs seemed unassailable until Vladimir Putin started having them arrested
and either tried, murdered extrajudicially or driven into exile, and one reason
Putin is so popular among his own people is he broke the power of these crooks
who were strangling the Russian economy — though according to imdb.com Gilroy’s
script would have seemed even more dated: 13 years after the breakup of the
Soviet Union he turned in a script that described it as still a going concern!)
It turns out that Ward Abbott (Brian Cox), a CIA official who was Conklin’s
immediate superior, was in bed with one of the oligarchs and had made a deal
that included eliminating Neski and his wife — the scene was staged to make it
look like a murder-suicide — and arranging a huge contract for the oligarch’s
company in exchange for a $150 million bribe. We learn this about halfway
through the film when a CIA agent named Danny Zorn (Gabriel Mann) discovers
that a CIA official is doing a corrupt deal with one of the oligarchs and
reports it to Abbott — not realizing that Abbott is the CIA official involved —
and Abbott coolly and methodically strangles him, leaving behind yet another
corpse whose existence he can blame on Bourne. It all comes to a head in yet
another spectacular car chase, in which Bourne finally runs down and kills
Kirill (Karl Urban, who quite frankly I thought was considerably hotter-looking
than Matt Damon!), the assassin hired by the oligarch with Abbott’s connivance
to kill Bourne and who had murdered Marie (ya remember Marie?) in the opening sequence. The Bourne
Supremacy was one of those sequelae which
doesn’t really put a different spin on the original but simply delivers more: more action sequences (director Greengrass
deliberately shot most of the finale with hand-held cameras to make it look
more realistic, as if what we were seeing was bits and pieces of action
captured by civilians with smartphones — though modern-day smartphones didn’t
exist in 2004, and as in The Bourne Identity every scene with computers in it is instantly dated
the moment we see the cathode-ray monitors all the computers are hooked up to),
more corpses (according to imdb.com, the body count in this one is nine, one
more than The Bourne Identity),
more uncertain loyalties.
About the only thing it doesn’t deliver that the first film did is a love interest
for the hero — he singles out Nicky (Julia Stiles), Pamela’s assistant, for his contact when he
briefly offers to turn himself in (or at least pretends to), and there’s one
highly charged scene with Neski’s daughter Irena (Oksana Akinshina), but no one
for Jason Bourne to romance and then consign to the usual fate of a Bond or
Bourne girl. As I wrote about The Bourne Identity, based on the evidence of the films Robert Ludlum
seemed to be trying to create an intelligence character midway between Ian
Fleming and John le Carré; he wanted a serious backstory and at least something
of the gritty realism of le Carré’s depiction of espionage, but he also wanted
a hero who would satisfy the action-adventure audience by getting into a lot of
scrapes and managing hair’s-breadth escapes from them. The tumbled state of
Bourne’s psyche — the still yawning gaps in his knowledge of who and what he is
— is the most persuasive part of the Bourne mythos, and it’s one in which Matt Damon’s limitations as
an actor, particularly the oddly impassive gaze with which he looks on just
about everything (more than one
imdb.com contributor noted that throughout The Bourne Supremacy, the only time we see Damon smile is in an old photo
of himself and Marie together in happier days), actually serve him. By seeming
so clueless about what sort of character he’s playing, Damon gets across that
he’s portraying someone who doesn’t quite know who he is, either! More incisive
filmmakers could have made considerably more out of Bourne’s crises of identity
(the way Alfred Hitchcock did with Cary Grant’s lead character in North
by Northwest, who knew who he was but had
no idea how he found himself enmeshed in the middle of a major espionage plot),
but the Bourne series as we have it (at least judging by the initial two —there
was a third in the original sequence, The Bourne Ultimatum, and after a one-off with The Hurt Locker star Jeremy Renner as Bourne, Matt Damon returned to
the role for a recent film called Jason Bourne that just got issued on Blu-Ray and DVD) is a
moderately entertaining romp through spy-movie clichés that misses greatness by
a long shot but delivers the goods for its intended audience.
