The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Directed by Paul Greengrass
A CIA operation to purchase classified Russian documents is blown by a rival agent, who then shows up in the sleepy seaside village where Bourne and Marie have been living. The pair run for their lives and Bourne, who promised retaliation should anyone from his former life attempt contact, is forced to once again take up his life as a trained assassin to survive.
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What critics compared The Bourne Supremacy to
…and the Bourne movies — all appalling…
“Jason Bourne” may entice ticket buyers with prospects of a creative and adrenalin-pumping reunion between Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass , a duo that went beyond typical blockbuster expectations with “ The Bourne Supremacy ” and “ The Bourne Ultimatum .”
Well, it looked amazing on paper: Matt Damon, star of the first three Bourne movies — which remains the best American spy movie franchise of the past 20 years — reuniting for the fifth film in the series with the brilliant Paul Greengrass, whose dynamic, hand-held storytelling powered the series’ two strongest entries, “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum.”
The conventional wisdom on the Bourne series has been that the Doug Liman-directed original, 2002’s “The Bourne Identity,” made for a sleek 21st-century spy movie, but that the series didn’t really kick in until Greengrass came along and shook things up with his two sequels, “The Bourne Supremacy” and “The Bourne Ultimatum.”
In 2004, when Mr. Greengrass took over the series with “The Bourne Supremacy” (Doug Liman had directed “The Bourne Identity” two years before), his approach to action filmmaking felt distinctive and new.
The fifth film in the franchise, Jason Bourne returns to the series’ roots, reuniting star Matt Damon with director Paul Greengrass, who helmed The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum — two of the best sequels ever made.
After nine years, Matt Damon returns to the role of the amnesiac assassin that made him an icon in 2002's The Bourne Identity , 2004's The Bourne Supremacy and 2007's The Bourne Ultimatum .
One can only assume that she enjoyed playing the bitch in The Bourne Supremacy / The Bourne Ultimatum and wanted a chance to refine her villainess skills.
Playing the warden in “Death Race” is directly akin to her Pam Landy government character in 2004’s “The Bourne Supremacy” and then again in 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum”.
Were the car stunts fluidly photographed and edited in a way that created an adrenaline rush for the viewer, as they were in 2001's " The Fast and the Furious " or 2004's " The Bourne Supremacy ," at least the film would be diverting.
The latest chapter takes place a few months after the car chase on the streets of Rio that signaled a high water mark for a car chase in film history, right up there with Bullitt and The Bourne Supremacy.
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Bond fails in the attempt, and winds up nursing his wounds in a beach house not unlike the one in which we found Jason Bourne in the opening of The Bourne Supremacy .
Also up for accolades is the extremely tight editing (Christopher Rouse, The Bourne Supremacy), which in the film’s first two sections is about as precise as a surgeon’s scalpel.
The sight of the game night attendees calmly conversing and enjoying some fine cheese while Brooks is getting his ass kicked as if he’s a stuntman in The Bourne Supremacy is a fun example of a bit that relies on complete tonal opposites.
None of this makes much sense, but director Doug Liman (“The Bourne Supremacy’’) doesn’t give you much time to think about it.
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I know I'm guilty of trotting out the same glorified examples and also the same scapegoats over and over, but to reiterate a point, a film like Paul Greengrass' The Bourne Supremacy feels just as alert as Miami Vice is to the post-millennial vanguards in espionage and transcontinental crime, but Greengrass' vision still arrives on screen as an integrated vision: a jewel-cut circuitry of complex ideas that is nonetheless conveyed by graspable characters emanating lucid emotions within clear, traceable circumstances.
While the first movie (the Doug Liman-directed The Bourne Identity) in this smartly engineered series focused on Bourne's quest for his own identity, and the second (the Greengrass-directed The Bourne Supremacy) revealed just what evil he'd been compelled to do, the third caps the quest by sending the guy home.
Still struggling to piece together gaps in his memory—alone again this time, after his girlfriend (Franka Potente) was killed in The Bourne Supremacy—Damon finds some clues to his identity in an article written by a London journalist (Paddy Considine).
In "The Bourne Supremacy," he figures out who made him what he is, why they're still out to get him, and gets back at them for killing his girlfriend.
The first episodes of the movie trilogy based on Robert Ludlum's novels The Bourne Identity (2002) and The Bourne Supremacy (2004) picked up the reputation as a thinking man's spy series.
The strategy worked for Greengrass in The Bourne Supremacy (2005), or perhaps that was just relief after the two-hour fret fest that was 2002's The Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman.
Following up last year’s United 93 , director Paul Greengrass (who also directed 2004’s slightly superior The Bourne Supremacy) once again goes for thrills with a political bent, here employing Abu Ghraib-style imagery and pervasive intelligence agency surveillance footage in an attempt to cast amnesiac spy Jason Bourne’s (Matt Damon) revenge mission against the government agency that turned him into a ruthless killer as the return of America’s repressed past crimes.