I liked the first Bourne movie, even though it had a lot of dumb stuff in it. If you check out my review, you'll see that I spent the last quarter of it talking about the various physical impossibilities and character stupidities that I had to ignore in order to enjoy the film. TBS had much, much less of that sort of thing. You can wonder how the taxi in Moscow kept running with so much damage done to it, and why Bourne never bothered to use any sort of disguise, and how they found him in India in the beginning of the movie, but that's all rather minor stuff.

I don't have a great deal to say about the film, after writing and editing and rewriting a good 50 reviews over the past 3 days, so let's just get to the categorized scores, shall we?

The Bourne Supremacy
Script/Story: 8
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 6
Overall: 7

I gave the first Bourne film a 7.5, and since that's probably a bit high in retrospect, I think the movies are pretty comparable. TBS has a better plot, far more intelligent and involved than the first one, and it's quite smart; I was surprised at how well every loose end was tied up, and how everything made sense in the end. It multi-tasks well; Bourne is investigating his past, recovering his lost memories, and investigating fragments of his amnesia-scarred mind, all while traveling, fighting for his life, grieving for his lost love (it'll probably come as no real surprise that the returning girlfriend lives about as long as the female love does in most every lone hero type movie) and constantly outthinking and outplanning his enemies and the CIA.

I can't tell you how refreshing it is to see an action movie that actually makes sense on multiple levels, and has strong reasons for everything to happen.  The bad guys have motives, Bourne has motives, the CIA thinks what it thinks for logical reasons, and everyone behaves in their best interest throughout. There aren't a bunch of things that are done just to advance the plot, the bad guys aren't just sadistic psychopaths who serve as straw men for the good guys to beat down and look heroic doing it.

The acting is good also; I liked the bad guy hit man, I liked how Damon played Bourne, and I liked the female CIA boss as she tried hard to concentrate her resources to capture someone who was always at least one step ahead of her.

My only real complaint about the movie was the photography. Not that it wasn't in focus or something, but this movie made more use of an unsteady-cam than I've ever seen in a non-home video. The first Bourne movie, and a distressing percentage of other recent action films, have gotten very happy with the shaky-cam. It can be a nice effect if done with restraint, even if it's not just trying to simulate an earth quake or the Enterprise taking a direct hit. But when every fight scene gives you vertigo, and even a great deal of the "people standing still talking" scenes make you feel like someone is jacking your chair up and down rapidly, I think it's being overdone.

There's one long hand to hand fight in TBS and the ridiculous amount of moving, shaking camera views made it almost unwatchable. It's edited to be impossible to tell what's happening, while still looking very fast and brutal, but couldn't they learn something from Kill Bill? The action sequences in that one, especially the hand to hand fight in the suburban house in the KB1 and the brutal trailer battle in KB2, were very close, very brutal, and very deadly... but you could at all times tell who was who and who was doing what. They did not require Michael J. Fox operating the camera to make them look more intense.

But really, other than that stylistic complaint, I don't have much to gripe about. The plot moved quickly and logically, things made sense, the dialogue was fine, and the picture was put together very well, especially the editing. The viewer had to be kept informed of what was going on overall, so we usually knew a bit more than Bourne did and the CIA people chasing him did, but he never seemed hopelessly confused or far behind, and neither did they. The characters figured things out as the audience did in several places, and I really appreciated that it all made sense in the end; that seemingly-random or superfluous events turned out to be crucially important in the end, and it all tied up neatly.

As I said about Bourne 1, he and the movies are really anti-James Bond secret agent stuff. It's not all toys and slick explosions and evil genius billionaires bent on world domination/destruction. It's smaller in scale, the characters have venal, dirty, greedy motives, and the larger issues of spying and international politics are almost entirely incidental to the characters and plot developments.

I'm almost curious enough to read the second Bourne novel, despite the dreadful writing evidenced in the opening chapter of the first one, which is as far as I got when I looked into it around the time of the first Bourne movie.