The Bourne Supremacy

Essential, and the film that changed what this series looked like to everybody else. Paul Greengrass replaced Liman and brought a handheld, short-lens, cut-on-motion style that had been a documentary register and was about to become the default grammar of the action film for fifteen years. Most of the imitations missed what makes it work here, which is that the camera is unstable and the geography never is.

It opens by killing Marie in the first reel, which is the decision the film has to earn and mostly does. Bourne stops being a man hiding from his past and becomes someone with nothing left to protect, and Damon plays the rest of it almost without expression. The Moscow car chase at the end is deliberately ugly, slow and attritional, two damaged vehicles grinding into each other in a tunnel rather than anything balletic.

What lifts it above a middle chapter is the last five minutes. Bourne goes to St. Petersburg to find the daughter of two people he killed on his first assignment, and tells her what he did, and the film ends on an apology rather than a victory. No other entry in the series does anything that difficult.

Structurally it is the connective tissue: Treadstone is wound up, Pamela Landy is introduced as the one person in the agency arguing in good faith, and the phone call that closes the film is picked up again, from the other end, in Ultimatum. The two are close to being one film.