‘Bourne’s‘ substance trumps its spy cliches

When a spy movie opens in some faraway corner of the Third World, it’s easy to spot the spooks. Just look for the handsome white guys with furrowed brows, linen clothes and full-size German rental cars.

“The Bourne Supremacy” is full of such caper cliches, but this sequel to 2002’s “The Bourne Identity” (novelist Robert Ludlum wasn’t one for sweating over titles, was he?) is so thrilling in its immediacy, so vertiginous in its car chases and fisticuffs, so infuriating in its convolution that you’re forced to switch off your caper-cliche blocker — provided you’re not prone to motion sickness or “Hey, that’s impossible” fastidiousness.

Director Paul Greengrass could not have made a more different movie from his last, the documentary-like “Bloody Sunday.” “Supremacy” is sleek, shiny and spastic. It fetishizes technology. Here, mobile phones can do everything but your laundry, and the entire world is shrunk to a hard-wired intercontinental grid that buzzes with credit-card transactions, electronic fingerprint matches and surveillance-camera close-ups.

The movie, adapted from Mr. Ludlum’s novel by Tony Gilroy, is preposterous, all right, but no more preposterous than your average superhero movie. Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, the CIA-assassin-turned-domesticated-amnesiac, endures body blows, bullets and car wrecks that would make NASCAR drivers blanch, but he walks away from “Supremacy” with little more than a limp and a sore shoulder.

In addition to being the bionic secret agent man, Bourne is multilingual and an expert traveler. He has fake passports stashed in safety deposit boxes all over Europe, can ace a city subway map in a single glance and administers mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while underwater.

The latter is performed on his girlfriend, Marie (Franka Potente), who is eliminated early by a rogue Russian secret-service agent (Karl Urban) involved in a complicated kickback scheme with ties to CIA moles and a nefarious multinational business tycoon who framed Bourne for a double-murder in Berlin. (You’ll be pop-quizzed later, reader.)

All Bourne wanted was to be left alone — we meet him in the Indian coastal town of Goa, where he’s living the simple life, dimly recollecting his past — but like Michael Corleone, he’s drawn back into the vortex of his old self.

The attack that claimed Marie, which was intended for him, brings Bourne back to Europe, the center of the action, not so much because of its strategic importance (the movie is all but oblivious to current events) but because it’s fun and glamorous to watch a spy trot from Naples to Munich to Berlin to Moscow.

Bourne’s activity attracts the attention of his minders back at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Joan Allen and Brian Cox play CIA honchos whose job it is to bring Bourne, whom they consider a loose cannon, back into the fold of the agency. There’s little room for Miss Allen and Mr. Cox to act here. The plot, tensed up at crucial points by the rattling percussion of John Powell’s score, requires them only to react — in the form of data retrieval, anxious floor-pacing and whatnot.

Mr. Damon is just as single-minded. He never cracks a smile, blinks an eye or plants a kiss. The Bourne character is darn near omniscient, capable of all sorts of derring-do and always one step ahead of his pursuers. But as good as he is at the art of escape, Bourne is consumed, eaten away at, by images of cold-blooded murders committed by his own hand.

“The Bourne” series works because its high-tech action, entertaining as it is, has ballast. Its hero realizes he’s an anti-hero.

***

TITLE: “The Bourne Supremacy”

RATING: PG-13 (Violence and intense action, brief profanity)

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