The movie every little action script wants to become when it grows up

[Shadowen]

This will contain some spoilers.

Was there ever a time since Good Will Hunting[/i>] that anyone who saw that movie ever saw another movie with Matt Damon and didn’t think of him as Matt Damon doing a decent job onscreen?

There wasn’t, until now. Damon has long been known as the greater of two actors in the Ben & Matt show. But now Matt Damon is gone, and in his place is Jason Bourne, amnesiac ex-black ops agent who just wants to live a normal life, but whom circumstances conspire against to keep in the game.

Bourne, to quote the commercials I’ve seen for Max Payne 2, “thought it was over. It wasn’t over.” Even after his warning two years ago, someone still has a vested interest in taking him out, framing him, or perhaps both—in any case, to hurt him in some fashion. And they manage to do a decent job of it…but of course, Bourne survives, he’s fighting mad, and he thinks he knows who’s behind it.

So begins a movie with more twists and turns than the full 500 laps at Indy, more than I could account for or explain here, more than I even remember. You may have heard the phrase “thinking man’s action movie”, “action movie with heart”, “action movie with character”, etc. Unless you’re talking about Lord of the Rings[/i>] (which is an epic, not an action movie), it’s all bullshit. The Bourne Supremacy[/i>] is the real deal.

Bond? Who can relate to the super-suave secret agent who fucks without condoms, drinks like a fish, uses implausibly high-tech gadgets instead of skills to get him out of tricky situations, and has no mental problems whatsoever? And Bond's a nancy-boy. Jason Bourne wouldn’t steal his lunch money; he’d sneak in at the exact point that would allow him to steal the money, eat his lunch and get away while making it look like the fault of the guy behind him.

And then at 3 p.m., he’d beat 007 up out by the flagpole, go home, study for ten minutes, and ace the math exam the next day.

Every single actor in the movie hits the ball out of the park. (Damon in particular sends that dinger into rush hour traffic, causing a 20-car pileup.) Franka Potente as the supportive, rocksteady Marie; Brian Cox sliming his way through his performance as Ward Abbott; Julia Stiles as the out-of-her-league Nicky, breaking down in the face of Bourne’s fury; and a Russian actress I’ve never heard of looks just like the little-girl-lost she plays in her first English language movie ever. The only possible exceptions for me were Marton Csokas, Karl Urban, and Karel Roden. Don't get me wrong; they did very well and I love their body of work. But I spent most of Csokas’s appearance as the next-to-last Treadstone operative trying to figure out where I’d seen him before, and when I realized who Urban was, each time he popped up for the rest of the film I thought “EOMER!”. I never figured out who Roden was in other movies until I checked IMDb, and it bothered me for the whole film.

Those are the only blemishes in the entire movie. Listen not to the bitching of the feeble-stomached weaklings who complain about the shaky camera--if anything, usage of cinema verite style only increases the sheer paranoia you feel.

Truly, Jason Bourne has achieved Supremeacy. I can’t wait for his Ultimatum.

[Kellanved]

1. My favorite Actor in it was:

Berlin; She played Munich, Moscow and herself.


As I live in Berlin, it was funny to see the locations at first ("Hey, I pass that corner every morning", "No you moron, you are already on Alexanderplatz - no way the Tram can go there", , "No need to study the table; the trains are too close together anyway", "Wow, he just got from one end of the city to the other awfully fast").

It laster got a little strange, when the action was set in Moscow ("How did the German foreign Ministry Building get to Moscow?", "I know that I've seen that bridge before...", "Why was it easy to read the plates of the cars in Berlin, but impossible in Moscow?"...)


Overall, a solid spy movie, with a thrilling post-cold-war story. Far better than I had expected.