Paul Greengrass's 2004 sequel opens with Bourne and Marie living quietly in Goa, a man who has found something worth protecting and knows it will not last. The film that follows is darker and more urgent than the original, introducing the handheld visual style that would define the franchise and shape the action genre for a decade. The Bourne Supremacy earns its darker register through the quality of the character work that precedes its most spectacular passages.
At a Glance
Director: Paul Greengrass
Runtime: 108 minutes
Starring: Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Brian Cox, Julia Stiles, Karl Urban
Release: 2004
Critics Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5 stars, a darker and more urgent masterwork)
Audience Rating: ★★★★ (4/5 stars, essential)
Plot
Bourne and Marie are living quietly in India when an assassin sent by a corrupt CIA officer frames Bourne for the murder of two CIA agents in Berlin. Marie is killed in the attack, and Bourne travels to Europe to find the man responsible and to uncover the truth about a past operation called Treadstone. The plot is the franchise's most emotionally weighted, using Marie's death as a dramatic catalyst of real weight and personal significance. The Berlin car chase is the film's most celebrated action sequence, a demonstration of Greengrass's handheld visual style at its most propulsive and spatially intelligent.
Characters
Bourne is given the franchise's most devastating starting point in this entry, a man whose attempt to build a life outside the world of violence is destroyed by the consequences of his past. Damon plays the character's grief and determination with a conviction and depth that makes this the franchise's most affecting performance, and his final scene with Irena Neski is the franchise's most moving moment. Karl Urban's Kirill is the film's most physically imposing antagonist, a Russian operative of considerable capability and menace. Brian Cox's Ward Abbott is the film's most carefully constructed villain, a CIA official of intelligence and moral corruption whose institutional authority gives the central conflict a complexity of real dramatic interest.
Meaning / Themes
At its core, the film is about guilt and responsibility, about Bourne's growing awareness of what he has done and his determination to acknowledge and atone for it. The final scene, in which Bourne contacts the daughter of a couple he killed during a Treadstone operation and acknowledges his responsibility for their deaths, is the franchise's most morally serious dramatic conclusion and one of the most genuinely affecting moments in the action genre's history.
Direction
Greengrass's direction is the franchise's most viscerally distinctive, with a command of the handheld visual style and a feel for the European settings that gives the film a physical immediacy and dramatic urgency the original's more measured visual approach never sought. The Berlin car chase is the film's directorial centrepiece, a demonstration of spatial intelligence and visual storytelling of such extraordinary precision that it stands among the finest action sequences of its era. Greengrass pitches the film at a register of urgency and emotional consequence, and the approach is wholly successful. The handheld visual style is the film's most distinctive and most divisive element, a visual approach that gives the action sequences a physical immediacy and sense of danger the more conventionally staged action films of its era conspicuously lacked. John Powell's score builds on the established themes with a propulsive energy and emotional precision that gives the film a sonic identity as distinctive as its visual one. The Bourne Supremacy was a major critical and commercial success on its release, widely regarded as a worthy and in many respects superior sequel to the original. Greengrass's handheld visual style was the most consequential single directorial decision in the action genre of its decade, and its impact on the visual language of the action thriller has been felt ever since.
Final Verdict: A darker and more urgent film that earns its intensity through the quality of its character work and the emotional weight of its dramatic developments. Damon's performance is the franchise's most affecting, the Berlin car chase ranks among the finest action sequences of its era, and Greengrass's direction establishes a visual language that would define the franchise and leave a permanent mark on the action genre. The Bourne Supremacy is the franchise at its most emotionally serious, and in its final scene, at its most genuinely moving.