Paranoid thriller 'Supremacy' respects the audience

By Chris Hewitt
Knight Ridder Newspapers

THE BOURNE SUPREMACY Directed by: Paul Greengrass Starring: Matt Damon Rated: PG-13, for violence and brief strong language Should you go? Yes. It's exciting and smart.

Damon's latest is "The Bourne Supremacy," a dandy paranoid thriller that begins confusingly but gets swifter and leaner as it goes. Under the direction of Paul Greengrass, who made the Irish "troubles" drama "Bloody Sunday," this is a movie with no down time. The whole thing is set in crisis mode, as Jason Bourne (Damon), a spy with amnesia, tries to get out from under a murder rap dumped on him by his old employers at the CIA.

"Supremacy" harkens back to great `70s thrillers such as "Three Days of the Condor" and "The Parallax View." It's not as good as those classics — there's that confusion at the beginning, and "Supremacy" would be richer if Bourne were trying to save something other than himself, like an ideal or a loved one — but it, too, springs out of the conviction that the world is a crummy place, run by crummy people, and that our only hope is that rare individuals with pure hearts and minds will triumph.

The difference between those `70s movies and "Supremacy" is that, mostly for marketing reasons, the new one is more hopeful. The hero must survive because, unlike in the `70s, he is signed for a sequel.

Greengrass directs "Supremacy" with energy and moral authority, and he stages a shocking, visceral car chase that seems unlikely to be topped this year. We still don't know a lot about Bourne — heck, Bourne doesn't know a lot about Bourne — but Damon's grave, haunted performance suggests there's lots to discover. He has an inner life (again, unlike Affleck's callow characters); we just haven't uncovered it yet.

What's best about "Supremacy" — and this, almost certainly, is Greengrass' doing—is its level of respect for the audience. The movie doesn't sugarcoat its characters or tell us what to think about them. There isn't, for instance, a scene where Bourne picks off one of the many goons on his tail and then pauses to help a blind nun cross a street. And when a former colleague tells Bourne, "You'll always be a killer," we know that's the truth.

The plot of "Supremacy" isn't much different from recent spook thrillers such as "Spy Game," movies that acknowledge the CIA can no longer tell the world's good guys from the bad guys. But, whereas most movies flatter us by encouraging us to laugh at the clueless CIA wonks, "Supremacy" doesn't let us off so easy.

Here, it's not just the CIA that can't tell heroes from villains. With Jason Bourne running around killing people and trying to remember his past, maybe we can't, either.