Reviewed - The Bourne Supremacy: In the same mould as the original, this better-than-average summer sequel offers thrills aplenty, writes Donald Clarke
In the first 10 minutes of Paul Greengrass's sequel to the nifty 2002 thriller The Bourne Identity - in which amnesiac Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) gradually deduced that he was once a CIA operative - something disastrous happens to some agents in Berlin and the hero, now living in occasionally anguished retirement in Goa, has a violent encounter with an assassin. All this is filmed with such frantic camera moves and edited with such hysterical insistence that viewers with dicky tummies should be advised to come bearing Dramamine.
But can Greengrass, who as the director of Bloody Sunday has some experience of managing chaos, really maintain such an atmosphere of desperate urgency over two hours? Surprisingly, the answer is an emphatic yes. The Bourne Supremacy may not feature a single believable character and it may not concern itself overmuch with human emotion, but on a visceral level it is as entertaining as any film released this summer.
The US intelligence agencies, in the person of the perennially dignified Joan Allen, come to the conclusion that Bourne, whose file they had closed, is behind the murders in Berlin and so they set out to bring the forgetful killing machine to ground. This involves travelling to many of the world's cities - Naples, Moscow, Paris - each of which is announced by a helicopter shot of the relevant burgh. The ne plus ultra of this technique sees Mr Greengrass's second unit fly past Canary Wharf to introduce a thirty-second shot of an Englishman looking quizzically at a computer screen.
But the main selling point is, of course, the actionsequences, which are breathtaking. The first film, directed by Supremacy's executive producer Doug Liman, seems to have established a pretty rigid template: halfway through we get an extraordinary fist fight and, just before the close, a top-notch car chase. Greengrass obliges and both sequences are the best of their kind since those in Liman's movie, which were in turn the best in decades. The increasingly malign influence of John Woo is, thank goodness, nowhere in evidence and the violence, free of slow motion and (sigh) balletic elegance, is delivered in short, kinetically charged flashes. Rather than gliding and sailing, bodies crash, clatter and thud against walls, bringing masonry to the floor amid satisfying clamour. It is often hard to know exactly what is going on, but your adrenalin should be racing so quickly that you will find it hard to care.
Those who find the action too noisy may still enjoy learning about contemporary espionage tradecraft. Who can fault a film that teaches the audience how to turn a magazine - such as, perhaps, the one you are currently holding - into a powerful explosive device?
