How great a movie is The Bourne Supremacy? At the beginning of a high-speed car chase through the streets of Moscow, Jason Bourne (once again ably underplayed by Matt Damon) pulls out a street map and looks at where he is going.

Of course, I got the stupid time wrong--or, more accurately, assumed the schedule would be the same as yesterday--so I had an hour to kill. So I got myself breakfast and found myself seated next to a pair of construction workers discussing the marital problems one of them was having. And I kept overhearing phrases like, "When she pushes you away physically, she's also pushing you away emotionally," and, "No, she's right; you have changed, you change a little every day." And my first impulse was to suggest that this might be a conversation better suited for when these guys are having their pedicures done, but that would be an uncharacteristic gender stereotyping on my part. And what it really boils down to is this: if you're within my earshot, please make sure the things that I'm going to be stuck listening to you say are going to be interesting, or shut up. I blame cell phones. That is all.

Anyway, back to the movie. For those of you coming in late, I loved The Bourne Identity (the Matt Damon film; haven't read the novel or seen the Richard Chamberlain miniseries or any other versions). I loved that it was an action spy movie for smart people. I loved that it felt like it was made by people who learned how to make these sorts of movies back in 1972 and who had never heard that you can do special effects on a computer I loved that the characters were characters, not Male Lead, Female Lead, Villain, Henchman, and that the events in the movie arose from the plot, not because somebody in a suit in a studio office said "We need a car chase to compete with the new Matrix movie!" And what I love about this one is it's more of the same, pretty much. The characters and story aren't quite as deep, but there isn't the same convenient journey of discovery for the character, either. This does feel like a legitimate continuation of the story, as much a "next chapter" as Spider-Man 2. Part of me hopes it does well enough for them to continue the series, but another part of me doesn't want to see it get to the point where it does become a contrieve series of "Jason Bourne's Next Adventures." We'll see.

And, once again, car chases in Europe still look way cooler than car chases in the US.