inderSTADTBala Gopalan's noWHere in the *CITY

Bourne-again Damon’s supremacy is unquestionable in the screen adaptation of the *next* story, Bourne Supremacy, from the Robert Ludlum series. Well, we are in sequel times (read attack of the sequels). My geek compadres, I am not referring to SQL, pronounced sequel, Server. So hold your horses before you start off on a tirade on how we never did leave Oracle and DB2 to be even thinking about SQL, much less declaring present times as belonging to it. I digress but then again I promise that it will not be for the last time!

In a marketing effort to distance the movie from the sequel bandwagon, some reports have it that Universal has apparently positioned Supremacy as the *next* story in the Jason Bourne series (a la James Bond) and not as Jason Bourne – Part Duex. Indications so far have been that the opening weekend will gross more than $30M. So it only remains to be seen how many times beyond Ultimatum will Jason (sorry, Damon) be Bourne again.

Coming to the movie itself, the short – unless you are a can’t-wait-born-in-6-months-types, save this one for a DVD rental from your favorite store. That said, you will enjoy it more with a home theatre system and the company of vetti friends you used to hang out with in your undergraduate college.

The long can be broken down into the good, the bad, and the proverbial ugly.

The good – Jason Bourne wanders in der stadt playing cat-and-mouse with Dubya’s Intelligence Agency, aka CIA, without the help of James Bond-ean gadgets or Lord of the Rings-like special effects. From Goa to Napoli to Muenchen to Amsterdam (the movie does if not Bourne) to Berlin to Moscow to New York. If nothing, it is a visual delight and personally, a flash back for me, including my stay in room #476 at the Westin Grand. Though don’t ask me how close it is to 245, where Agent Landy stays in the movie. And then, there is Goa – shown in tropical and vibrant Indian colors. The scene, where the Maruti Gypsy is pulled out of the river with a crowded bridge in the background panorama, is especially remarkable – visually. Lastly, we have the car chase – Hyundai on Gypsy, in India. I was relieved that there were no Amritrajes driving auto-rickshaws!

The bad – Franke Potente and Julia Stiles are wasted. Joan Allen’s Agent Landy mouths clichés and is as predictable as the release of the *next* story after this one from the Jason Bourne series. Brian Cox and Karl Urban as the US and Russian bad boy, respectively, are adequate and mark their class attendance. Matt Damon does barely enough to collect his paycheck in the scenes where he wakes up after one of his recurring nightmares, as with all the scenes where he mopes the loss of Franke Potente’s Marie.

The ugly – Action scenes, particularly the fist-and-legs combat in Muenchen and the car chase, Lada Zhiguli on Mercedez, in Moscow. If the intent was B-grade blurry-cannot-hold-the-camera-steady visual delirium then there can be no further discussion on this subject. On a personal note, it is unfortunate that I have not had a chance to visit Goa yet, of all the staedten shown in this Bourne thriller .. a situation that needs to be addressed at the earliest!