Bourne to Kill

WHEN THE MOVIE version of Robert Ludlum's roller-coaster espionage adventure The Bourne Identity was announced a few years back, it struck me as disingenuous-an example of a studio, a director and a star trying to get in on the teen-pandering, high-body-count action-film genre and scoop up loads of cash while pretending they weren't getting their hands all bloody. The finished product, which starred Matt Damon and was directed by Doug Liman (Swingers), allayed some but not all of my worries. I appreciated the nods toward real-world immediacy-the political and geographical details, the frenzied handheld camerawork, the mostly unglamorous way the violence was shot and edited-and found the boyish, small-framed Damon surprisingly credible as a man of action.

Damon wasn't a cartoon bruiser like Schwarzenegger or Stallone, or a less imposing but still glamorized tough guy like Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon pictures. But as amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne-a highly skilled black-ops soldier discarded by the state that created him, back from the dead and unwilling to forgive his betrayers-he was psychologically believable, more man than superman. The closer he came to unraveling his buried past, the more he seemed to wish he'd died after all-an uncharacteristically 70s attitude toward what might otherwise have been a standard-issue vengeful action hero.

Like Pierce Brosnan's fine, mostly underappreciated work in the recent James Bond pictures, Damon's performance suggested the psychic damage wrought upon those who spend their lives surviving and inflicting violence. The story's subtext-buried so far beneath the chases and hand-to-hand combat scenes that one could easily miss it on first viewing-was that in some sense, all killers are amnesiacs, people who choose (or are forced) to become something inhuman, nearly mechanical, and who must reject their own humanity to function.

Unfortunately, the film's intelligence was blunted by a certain superficiality. The jaunty, somewhat arbitrary affair between Bourne and his unwilling partner, Marie (Franka Potente), made the whole thing seem a bit too much like a date movie-Before Sunrise meets Three Days of the Condor-and Liman and his screenwriter, Tony Gilroy, didn't burrow as deeply into Bourne's character as I wanted them to. At times the whole film seemed afraid of being taken too seriously.

The Bourne Supremacy has no such fears. It's darker, wiser and more focused than its predecessor-a rare sequel that's intelligent and purposeful enough to justify its own existence. It's less a standard-issue, bullet-squibs-and-neck-snaps action picture than a psychological drama whose ideas just happen to be dramatized through violence-like the two French Connection films, or Cavale, the action-movie installment of Lucas Belvaux's film series Trilogy. Damon, director Paul Greengrass (who helmed the grimly intelligent, documentary-flavored Bloody Sunday) and returning screenwriter Gilroy are not content to tread the same ground and call it a day. Instead, they dig into elements the first movie glossed over-particularly the notion that Bourne wishes he weren't a killer. Rather, he kills for three reasons: to uncover crucial facts that more ruthless, purposeful, well-connected killers don't want him to discover; to ensure his own survival; and because he can't stop killing.

Like John Rambo in the original First Blood-one of the great action films of the 80s, unfairly contaminated in public memory by its silly, jingoistic sequels-Bourne is an American military version of Frankenstein's monster, a murderous slave raised from the dead to punish the world that created him. Cinematographer Oliver Wood preserves the jumpy, lifelike feel of the original, shooting the whole film handheld and in widescreen, 2:35 to 1 aspect ratio, but the images are richer and darker this time, and more attuned to the script's themes. Damon is often lit from above, which pools his eyes in darkness, exaggerates his high forehead and slightly rectangular face and makes him seem at once implacable and helpless. Sometimes he looks so much like Boris Karloff's creature that he might as well have bolts in his neck.

Like the original, the sequel throws out so much tangled information at such a hell-on-wheels pace that the net effect is paradoxical: After an hour or so, one eventually gives up trying to keep the story straight and responds to the picture as a work of pure cinema that might as well have no plot whatsoever. (Midway through The Bourne Supremacy, I realized I could barely remember what happened in the first film despite having seen it twice. Insert amnesia joke here.) That's not a crippling problem, though. In films like this, individual events are less important than characters, images and themes; plus, there's a powerful twist in the first 15 minutes that drives the whole picture, and I'd rather not spoil it.

Suffice it to say that when the film begins, Bourne is retired from killing, but in no time flat, he's back, thanks to a frame-up involving a Russian crime cartel and a shady CIA operation gone awry. Bourne races across Europe trying to clear his name, eliminating everybody who wants him dead and extracting information as he goes along. In the process, he learns new details of his past life and even darker truths about his conditioning by the government. Joan Allen is good in a nearly thankless part as a CIA officer pursuing Bourne and untangling the frame-up; she mostly has to look steely, defensive and concerned and say things like, "Get me the Russian Interior Ministry." Bourne Identity returnee Julia Stiles seems too young and too well-known to be cast in a bit part as a CIA analyst, but she's affecting in a tense scene opposite Bourne, whose coiled rage explodes in a verbal tirade as scary as any of his rampages. Fellow returnee Brian Cox is characteristically excellent as Allen's colleague and sometime spoiler, a career spook with no illusions about anything, including the government's assembly-line production of killers.

Best of all is Damon, who gives one of the great action-film performances of recent times. You could probably fit all his dialogue on two single-spaced pages, but he doesn't fill the character's silence by over-emoting. He's opaque in a good way; he lets you sense what Bourne is feeling without revealing what he's thinking. And throughout The Bourne Supremacy, he lets you know that on a subrational level, Bourne is aware of the irony of his predicament: The same lethal skills he wishes he'd never learned are the only thing keeping him alive. There's moral intelligence in Damon's acting. He makes Bourne a walking contradiction befitting our bleak times: a murderous victim.

MARIA FULL OF GRACE Joshua Marston's drama about a Colombian drug mule is a piercingly intelligent first film. Catalina Sandino Moreno plays the title character, Maria Alvarez, a young woman who works in a warehouse, stripping thorns from roses. Most of her paltry wages go to support her mom and her sister, and her sister's infant son. When Maria becomes pregnant, she declines her boyfriend's offer of marriage; she'd rather go to the United States and make her own way, even if it means swallowing 60 heroin pellets wrapped inside sawed-off rubber-glove tips and sneaking on a plane with a fake passport.

You've heard about this type of smuggling before, but Marston makes it fresh by showing it step-by-step, from the perspective of one character. Like all good dramatic filmmakers, he's equally interested in what happens and how it feels. Shooting on location in Bogota, New Jersey and New York, Marston and Moreno take you inside this tough teenager's head without spelling out what she's thinking. Moreno's performance has true star quality; like Jane Fonda's work in the 70s, it's a performance aimed at thinking adults, no pandering allowed.

Style-wise, Marston doesn't swing for the fences. With a few exceptions, he doesn't use the camera as an expressive tool, but as a recording device. That's all right, though. His script is concise, well-constructed and packed with journalistic detail, and quite poetic in places. Marston's cinematographer, Jim Denault, specializes in precise handheld photography; this is some of the best work he's ever done-at once spontaneous and controlled. The cast is note-perfect, from leads down to bit players.

Given the film's Important Subject Matter, the temptation to overdo things-to push for "powerful" moments-must have been awfully seductive. Luckily, Marston resisted. It's too early to tell what sort of filmmaker he'll become, but on the basis of Maria, I suspect he already has a crucial quality many other directors lack: The wisdom to get out of the way and let the story tell itself. o