The Bourne Supremacy
| State of body | Appeared to be a fit young man, but worn out through too many repetitions of the same exercise. On closer inspection, a great deal older than he first appeared. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Inspected once. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | Some confusion about what happened to the body – it disappeared before autopsy proper could begin. |
“The Bourne Supremacy†is full of car chases, foot chases, double-crosses and cleverness. It is ostensibly a revenge tale – Bourne’s girlfriend is killed in the first ten minutes – but is more a journey of self-discovery (or, more accurately, self-recall) by the end of the film, as he discovers the meaning behind his recurring nightmares, and makes a kind of atonement for it. Unfortunately, the latter story is nowhere near compelling enough to carry the movie. It is easy to guess that Bourne was involved in something nasty before he lost his memory – he was a CIA assassin, after all – and it is salutary that the Bourne films attempt to put a human face on these big spy/conspiracy stories (to excellent effect in the first film – I particularly liked Franka Potente, and Clive Owen’s assassin character), but the fact that Bourne shot a politician and his wife just isn’t compelling enough. The revenge sub-plot goes nowhere, really, as Bourne insists on not killing those responsible for her death. Which is nice – I usually find revenge stories pretty boring – but again, not very compelling. By the end of the film, with Bourne walking away into the snow, I found myself wishing that the girl (to whom he has revealed that he assassinated her parents) would take some potshots at him from her window. She wouldn’t have to hit. I was just taken with the idea that she’d actually do something.
I think it would have been a better film if Potente’s character hadn’t died. Killing off a major character can be a good move, but I don’t think it worked here. Bourne is so closed-off for the remainder of the film, it’s a lot harder to care whether he gets killed or not, or whether he figures out what his nightmares were about, or whether he unravels the plot against him. Her death highlights the meaninglessness of his existence, which is a bit of a bummer for him and for us. Keeping her alive gives us more scope for cliché, certainly: narrative convention almost insists that she become a bargaining chip between Bourne and the CIA. The simple solution might be to sideline her by getting her somewhere completely safe, or to have them separate before the film begins. Perhaps she is away on a trip when he gets uncovered, and he has to work delicately to find her without letting the bad guys know. Perhaps, even, the bad guys or the CIA have found her but not taken her: they’re content to watch her and wait for him to show up. Or perhaps she was secretly researching the significance of his nightmares, and discovered that what he did was so nasty, she’s hiding from him. The problem with the script as it stands is that her death casts a big weight over the film, and it isn’t meaningfully tied to his search for answers.
Alright. Hands up everyone who didn’t see immediately that Brian Cox’s character was a treacherous cad who would wind up killing one of his own team who found out too much, and then commit suicide near the end. This is a well-worn plot element, and they don’t do anything interesting with it. In fact, the overall plot, with treachery within the CIA and Russian mafia, is generic and almost instantly forgettable. I am having trouble remembering the details of it, and I only saw it six hours ago. It doesn’t make much sense to plant evidence that Bourne was responsible for the murders (and then attempt to kill him). They would have certainly been better off leaving no evidence at all of who was responsible – the CIA is already aware there is a traitor. They had no compelling reason to frame anyone, no moment that sent chills down our spine as we realize their nefarious plan. This is the kind of moment that we live for in this kind of thriller: the moment at which we realize someone has been terribly clever. Die Hard had it in spades.
Let us, then, construct a narrative in which it is really important that he be framed, and that the CIA subsequently try to kill him while he attempts to discover the truth. That, despite its vintage, is the compelling part of the plot; the bit we remember. His missing memories should be a vital component of this narrative (which was already the case, in that his first mission, the one he has forgotten, is connected to the current murders, confirming to the CIA that he was responsible for both). This worked well in the first film, and could work well again here.
Why would it be important to frame Bourne in particular for a murder? One reason might be to draw him out and compel him to do a revenge killing, of the person the bad guys really want killed, but are unable (or unwilling) to get to themselves. Or perhaps a former enemy, upon learning that Bourne is still alive (but not knowing where he is), is intent on setting the CIA against him to get him killed. It’s not particularly difficult to construct scenarios that drift further from the existing plot, but which tie in closer to his nightmares. Perhaps Bourne’s guilty secret is that he didn’t murder someone he was supposed to, and they had remained secret until now (and that his initial recall of the person leads him to assume he did kill them). Or that, perhaps, another assassin spared his life, and went underground instead. The big revelation, as it stands, is a bit of a wet blanket. We have no investment at all in the assassinated couple, and they don’t sell his repentance nearly well enough. One big, surprising twist is needed here, preferably a twist to Bourne’s character. Either he thinks he was worse than he really was (eg. his fragmentary recall suggests he killed someone, when he didn’t) or he incorrectly thinks someone else was responsible for an innocent’s death, when it was really him.
The film works best when we see Bourne’s extreme competence at work, simply because it is shown very believably. We are shown the odds stacked against him, and then exactly how he manages to escape anyway. We can see how quick he is at improvising, and his clever detective work. So it is particularly a surprise when Bourne finally catches up with the traitor and refuses to kill him, that this is not the end of the film, and that there’s another half-hour to go in which he is simply trying to track down the daughter in Moscow to apologise to her. This last section feels like a very long coda to the main story, even though there are two villains left to get their come-uppances. It would have been preferable to contrive Bourne going to Moscow first – perhaps in search of the daughter, but mainly to find the bad guys and thus the traitor. The CIA team would naturally follow, so the chases would have both the Russians and the CIA after him, and the revelation of the traitor could come right at the end. Also, if we’re going to have Cox’s character as the traitor, we should at least have had it a little less obvious – perhaps if he advocated taking Bourne alive, and maneuvered more subtly to get him killed, perhaps with a co-conspirator sniper.
It is a bit of a pity. The Robert Ludlum books are rather silly, from distant memory, and the film treatments have a gravity and sense of reality to them that is admirable, and allows them to get away with a multitude of sins – the old amnesia trick, the old traitor-from-within yarn, the old he-tried-to-get-out-but-they-dragged-him-back-in schtick. Almost. The underlying plot is not nearly interesting or clever enough, and I’m afraid that in a couple of months time I’ll have trouble remembering much about the film at all.