After the
grueling experience that was making The
Bourne Identity (2002), Matt Damon was understandably wary about reprising
the role of Jason Bourne. However, the film’s substantial box office success
meant that the studio was eager to crank out a sequel and brought their leading
man back into the fold with the promise of a new director after Doug Liman
managed to alienate almost everyone on the first film. Paul Greengrass,
director of the critically-acclaimed Bloody
Sunday (2002) came on board taking up where Liman left off by adopting the
same loose, hand-held camerawork and cranking up the intensity, especially with
the action sequences, to the detriment of some that felt the herky-jerky
movements resulted in motion sickness. Regardless, The Bourne Supremacy (2004) was a hit both critically and
commercially, outperforming Identity.
Bourne (Matt
Damon) and Marie (Franka Potente) have gone off the grid by taking refuge in
India and this gives him time to sort through his fragmented memories and
feverish nightmares. But, as is always the case with these kinds of films, our
hero can’t stay hidden for long and trouble finds him. Meanwhile, a top-secret
government deal in Berlin goes bad. Two agents are assassinated by Russian bad
guys who steal $3 million and files that pertain to the whereabouts of Bourne. Greengrass
ups the stakes right from the get-go as he has Bourne framed for the agents’
deaths and the stolen money and has an assassin (Karl Urban) track him and
Marie down. An exciting car chase ensues that leaves Bourne alone and putting
on him on the run again. This makes him dangerous as he has nothing holding him
back so he can focus entirely on finding out who wants him dead and sift
through the remnants of Operation Treadstone from the first film.
One of the
first things that becomes obvious while watching this film is how its look
harkens back to 1970s American cinema. Director Paul Greengrass utilizes the
gritty, realistic look of his previous film, the powerful Bloody Sunday, with a lot of hand-held camerawork and snap zooms to
give a you-are-there rush of adrenaline and urgency to the action sequences. In
the car chases, Greengrass often places the camera right in the vehicle so that
it is almost like we are riding along with Bourne, trying to piece together his
fragmented past. In particular, the first chase in India is like The French Connection (1971) by way of
Calcutta. Tony Gilroy’s screenplay wastes no time getting into it. We’re not 15
minutes into the film and Bourne is being chased by a mysterious and ruthless
Russian assassin. It is this intense, no-nonsense pacing that propels this film
so that one barely notices the two-hour running time.
Matt Damon
plays Bourne with a quiet determination and intensity. It’s a surprisingly
minimalist performance devoid of self-conscious tics and proves that his
performance in the first Bourne film
was no fluke. Bourne is not some invincible, super-soldier, but a tortured man
trying to rebuild his past and his identity. He doesn’t kill unless absolutely
forced to. And yet, he is certainly a man of action, capable of going from an
inert, passive figure to one full of explosive action in a heartbeat. Supremacy sheds more light on his past
as he’s haunted by a job where he killed a Russian politician and his wife.
Damon does a nice job of portraying a man coming to terms with the fact that he
is a killer. Bourne also comes to terms with the notion that what was just
another mission for him forever changed the life of a young woman who was made
an orphan because he killed her parents. It is an important part of the
humanizing of Bourne as he sheds his past of being a detached assassin to
someone trying to redeem himself. He tracks down people like Nicky Parsons
(Julia Stiles), introduced in Identity
as a handler to the Treadstone assassins, that can provide him with pieces of
his past so that he confronts it and understand what he was in order to change
who he is in the present.
The
primary bone of contention that critics had with The Bourne Supremacy was how Greengrass films the action sequences.
There is an impressively staged fight scene between Bourne and another
Operation Treadstone survivor in Munich that is dizzyingly claustrophobic
thanks to extensive hand-held camerawork that dives right into the chaos. It is
memorable not only for its jarring brutality but also for Bourne’s skill with a
rolled-up magazine that he uses to defend himself against a rather large knife.
Greengrass’ camera flies around the tight confines of this room, dragging us
along for this visceral, almost primal sequence. He treads a fine line between
being edgy and incoherent, but knows just how far to push it – something that
the countless imitators didn’t always achieve. This approach drew criticism for
being too fragmented and disorienting, making it difficult to see what was
happening but I think it was Greengrass’ attempt to put the audience right in
the middle of the action and to experience the sudden and brutal nature of how
quickly these guys fight.
Joan Allen’s Pamela Landy is an interesting character in that initially it appears
as if she will be an antagonist like Conklin in The Bourne Identity, but when she’s assigned to investigate the
Berlin job she uncovers the existence of Treadstone and this brings her up
against Ward Abbott (Brian Cox), the operation’s caretaker and the man who also
mothballed it. She’s no dummy and quickly figures out its nature, what Conklin
was up to and Bourne’s role, which, in a nicely executed scene, quickly recaps
the events of Identity for those who
haven’t seen it. Over the course of Supremacy,
she shows indications of sympathy towards Bourne’s plight that are developed
further in The Bourne Ultimatum
(2007). Allen’s scenes with Cox are interesting as they are often fused with
tension as Landy uncovers the secrets of Treadstone while Abbott, clearly
uncomfortable with his dirty laundry being aired, tries to cover his ass, which
makes for some heated exchanges between the two as they butt heads.
The Bourne Supremacy gives more screen-time to the
character of Nicky Parsons. Landy brings her along because of what she knows,
but Nicky ends up playing a crucial role when Bourne confronts her, asking
questions about the operation. Stiles was an up and coming movie star in the
late 1990s with films like 10 Things I
Hate About You (1999), but had dropped off the mainstream radar by the
mid-2000s. It is nice to see her pop up in the Bourne films even if she isn’t give much to do initially.
The Bourne Supremacy was based loosely on the 1986
best-selling novel of the same name by Robert Ludlum. Universal Pictures
offered screenwriter Tony Gilroy $3 million to write the screenplay and he
agreed, but only if it wasn’t a repeat of The
Bourne Identity. Gilroy used a plot point from the novel – Marie is
kidnapped and held ransom, forcing Bourne out of hiding – as the impetus for
the sequel. The screenwriter came up with the idea of taking Bourne on “what
amounts to the samurai’s journey, this journey of atonement,” said producer
Frank Marshall. Gilroy didn’t want to make a revenge movie because “Bourne
killed people and he doesn’t start the movie with a clean slate. There’s a lot
of blood on his hands.” He decided to make Bourne a reluctant murderer and that
he should suffer for his crimes. To this end, Gilroy envisioned Supremacy as “The Searchers of action films,” but was upset that Greengrass came
in and placed an emphasis on action and not Bourne’s atonement.
Next, the
producers had to find a new director that would have an affinity for the
subject matter. Gilroy recommended that Marshall watch Bloody Sunday, directed by Paul Greengrass. It was a gritty
recreation of the 1972 peaceful civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland
that ended in violence. The producers were impressed with the film’s immediacy
and sense of realism. Greengrass liked The
Bourne Identity and how it “married an independent sort of feel with a
mainstream Hollywood sensibility.” He flew to Prague and met with actor Matt
Damon and they talked about the character of Bourne. Greengrass said of the
character: “I think this film is not so much about a man who’s lost his memory,
although that is part of it – but it’s more about what happens when you’ve
recovered your memory and realized that you’re actually a bad man.”
Damon
spent months doing personal and combat training including special firearm
instruction in order to portray a trained assassin. The actor worked with a
SWAT expert in Los Angeles so that when Bourne first picks up a gun in the film
“it needs to look like an extension of his arm,” Damon said. He and Greengrass
got along right away with the actor happy to have a director “who was putting
you first and saying, ‘Be as natural and real and honest as you can and it’s
our job to capture it rather than yours to adjust for the sake of my shot.’
That’s the thing an actor wants to hear.” The actor had no problem doing most
of his own stunts, but was apprehensive doing an underwater scene where
Bourne’s car goes crashing into a river. “I didn’t want to do that at all,”
Damon said and so he worked with a diving instructor a couple times a week for
a month in order learn how to relax underwater without an oxygen mask and
eventually be able to do simple tasks like tying a shoe. Still, after one day
of shooting under water, he “woke up probably four times gasping for breath,
thinking I was drowning. It was terrible.”
Principal
photography began on the streets of Moscow then moved to Berlin with the city’s
former eastern sector doubling for the streets of the Russian capital and
finally ending in Goa, India. Producer Patrick Crowley wanted the transition
from locations to mirror Bourne’s arc “from lush, tropical and warm to more
progressively cool, steely, blue, then finally to grays.” To depict the
visceral car chases, the production utilized a high-speed, low center of
gravity, chassis replacement stunt driving camera platform that was piloted by
a stunt driver from a moveable cockpit, which allowed all kinds of camera
placement around the vehicle.
The Bourne Supremacy enjoyed most
positive reviews from mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out
of four stars and wrote, “That Matt Damon is able to bring some poignancy to
Jason Bourne makes the process more interesting, because we care more about the
character.” In his review for The New
York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, “Where most Hollywood action movies,
edited within an inch of their lives, use split-second leaps and flashes as
visual jolts to camouflage holes, The
Bourne Supremacy knows what it’s doing. Its relentless speed not only puts
you in Jason’s shoes by suggesting the adrenaline rush of a fugitive who has no
time to look around, but also suggests Jason’s quick thinking.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film an
“A” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Even the fights have an ominous
unpredictability. In the first film, Bourne slipped into robotic martial-arts
mode. Here, he’s clawing for his life.”
USA Today gave the film three-and-a-half out of
four stars and Claudia Puig wrote, “As fine a job as Doug Liman did on Bourne Identity, Greengrass gives Bourne Supremacy a dynamism and edgy
quality closer in spirit to a gritty European thriller than a summer action
blockbuster.” The Los Angeles Times’
Manohla Dargis wrote, “There are all sorts of pleasures to be had in this
summer bauble, but the most unexpectedly resonant is the sight of this boyish
face frozen in a mirror as he finally grasps what he did once upon a time.” In
his review for the Washington Post,
Desson Thomson wrote, “Supremacy feels
sleek, elegant and stripped down. And its straight-ahead plotting, low-tech
action sequences and narrative efficiency make effortless mockery of the James
Bond franchise.”
The people
behind the Bourne franchise are smart
and willing to take chances. They cast an atypical action hero with Matt Damon,
surrounded him with an eclectic cast that mixed Hollywood and internationally
known stars (with the likes of Julia Stiles, Brian Cox and Karl Urban) and
hired independent filmmakers like Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass against type
to direct, letting them put their own unique stamp on their respective films. Ultimately,
The Bourne Supremacy is all about the
title character making amends for his past. There is a scene where he confronts
the woman, whose parents he killed, that is rich in understated emotion as Bourne
takes responsibility for his actions and tells her what really happened. It’s a
great way to end the film as Greengrass eschews the cliché of a climactic
action sequence (which happens before this scene) in favor of a more poignant
one as Bourne atones for one of his many sins while also setting things up for
the next installment.
SOURCES
The Bourne Supremacy Production Notes. Universal
Pictures. 2004.
Carter,
Kelly. “Director to the Manner Bourne.”
Los Angeles Times. July 18, 2004.
Max, D.T.
“Twister.” The New Yorker. March 16, 2009.
Rebello,
Stephen. “Playboy Interview: Matt
Damon.” Playboy. December 13, 2012.
