The movie skillfully delivers a series of fights, stalkings, plottings and chases, punctuated by a little brooding. The best word for Bourne is "dogged." After a brief illusion of happiness, he puts his head down and marches relentlessly ahead into the lairs of his enemies, not even bothering with disguises, because he's using himself as bait. He always wears the same black shirt, pants and jacket, in scenes taking him from India to Italy to Germany to Russia (no one complains).
Bourne awakened from amnesia, we recall from the first movie, possessed of skills he did not even know he had, and with a cache of passports and other aids to survival, a cache left to him by -- well, you remember. As "Supremacy" opens, he has gone as far away as he can go, dropping out with Marie (Franka Potente), the woman he met in the first adventure. They're living on the beach in Goa, in southern India, happy as clams until Bourne spots a stranger who is wearing the wrong clothes, driving the wrong car and turning up in all the wrong places.
They're still after him, or someone is. What is it about Bourne that makes his enemies prepared to spend millions to wipe him out? Sometimes he seems tantalizingly close to remembering. He suffers from Manchurian Candidate's Syndrome, a malady that fills your nightmares with disconnected flashes of something dreadful that may or may not have happened to you. I saw "The Bourne Supremacy" on the very same day I saw the remake of "The Manchurian Candidate." I was able to compare the symptoms, which involve quick cuts of fragmentary images.
The movie is assembled from standard thriller ingredients, and hurtles from one action sequence to another in India and Europe, with cuts to parallel action in Washington and New York. What distinguishes it is Bourne's inventiveness. There's a scene where he takes about four seconds to disable an armed agent and steal his cell phone contact list, and you're thinking, this is a guy who knows what he's doing. And how about the innovative use he finds for a toaster? It's neat to see him read a situation and instantaneously improvise a response, often by using lateral thinking.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55lkqTCs7rEZqquqKKauqKv2GZpaWhk