A couple of weekends ago, Paul and I sat down and spent some time watching movies and taking care of his son Tam whilst our wives spent a night stamping and scrapbooking. I had rented Hidalgo but we instead decided to watch The Bourne Identity (2002) and The Bourne Supremacy (2004), both starring Matt Damon. Due to my living under a rock (per usual), I had not seen them.

I’m going to review both movies together since they flow so very well as a whole story. In fact, that’s probably the very first of my comments. Very few sequels flow from one to the next without having issues, and the Bournes did very well at this. There wasn’t any blaring discrepancies that I could detect, and that’s important when doing a series like this.

Identity definately had the better “mysterious” edge in it what with the whole “lost identity” angle. But both of them had plenty of the good old spy movie content.

Identity and Supremacy had, nicely enough, a great supporting role by Julia Stiles, one of my favorite actresses ever and a darn cute one. Her role was definately different for her, smaller and more supporting, and I’m still unsure as to how her acting was during some of the more “routine” scenes where she was acting as support for the CIA foreign agents. There were a few moments where you could tell she was slightly out of her element, I think. All in all, however, she did pretty well.

The movies are full of action and spy mystery and intrigue. As Paul commented, on Supremacy they ended up using a different camera technique during the fight scenes that ends up being more realistic but ends up jumping the camera around a lot. I guess it was ok but definately was “too much” at certain points when the viewer just got sick instead of feeling like they were in the action. That’s like The Blair Witch Project where they used that camera technique to make it seem like it was ACTUALLY taken by the kids in the woods, but at points it overshadowed the movie and instead of concentrating on the story, you were just saying, “Ugh…would they PLEASE stop shaking it.” Anything that breaks that fourth wall is wrong, wrong, wrong.

All in all, two excellent movies that I’m sorry I missed the first time around but am very glad I picked up this time.