Make no mistake that The Bourne Supremacy is a hell of an entertaining romp and remains so as it turns 15 years old in 2019. But how has it held up as an action movie? Well, the that’s a different matter altogether.
The action scenes in The Bourne Supremacy were gritty, fast-paced and quickly edited, and were considered next-level stuff back in 2004. This technique is colloquially known as “shaky cam” and while director Paul Greengrass didn’t invent it (it’s been around since the 1920s and was popular in the 1960s), he definitely popularised it with Supremacy.
And in doing so, he ruined almost every Hollywood action movie for at least a decade.
There’s no denying that The Bourne Supremacy‘s action scenes were intense as all hell, but there’s also no denying that almost everything is a blurred, motion sickness-inducing mess. There’s no Jackie Chan levels of smoothness in the action, just pure chaos.
Sure there’s a gritty realism to shaky cam, not to mention how the technique works on a storytelling level for the Bourne movies (he’s got amnesia, guys!), but it would also be nice to see a fight or car chase that’s actually, you know, not incoherent.
But that didn’t really matter to audiences at the time as The Bourne Supremacy became a big hit and nearly every action movie subsequently just had to do the shaky cam thing because that’s what people wanted. Apparently.
This popularisation of shaky cam in Hollywood has sadly become part of The Bourne Supremacy‘s legacy. Action-heavy films like the James Bond series, Man of Steel and The Hunger Games all doubled down on the shaky cam style, regardless of whether it aided in the storytelling.
There are practical reasons for why movies adopt this style – usually to hid poor editing or the fact that the actors can’t actually fight for real – but it has become an all-encompassing crutch for most action films to the detriment of the genre.
The worst offender that comes to mind is the first Hunger Games film, which basically used shaky cam for almost every single type of scene, even simple talking scenes.
It’s only in recent years that we’re starting to get over the whole shaky cam fad, thanks to films like The Raid Redemption, Mad Max: Fury Road and all three John Wicks, which actually made sure we could clearly see what was going on at all times even during all the madness.
That being said, we’re not out of the woods completely just yet as there are still films that still subscribe to the shaky cam schtick, like most Marvel movies, particularly the Captain America flicks.
The Bourne Supremacy popularised shaky cam, for better or worse, and it’s tough to not hold that against it. But they say you need to take two steps back before taking three forward and it finally seems like Hollywood action scenes are on an upwards trend once again.