David Mitchell

If my favourite film was the film I’d watched most times, my favourite film would be The Bourne Supremacy. It’s the second of the trilogy, the one where his girl gets shot in India at the start. Wife and me watched it again the other night; disturbingly, it’s ten years old this year.

Bourne and the lovely Marie think they’re ‘off the grid’ and forgotten by the CIA bad eggs who wanted, in The Bourne Identity, their malfunctioning programmed-assassin dead. But Bourne still can’t remember his old life and he’s tormented by half a memory of one particular murder he carried out which he thinks holds the key to something big. When a Russian hitman turns up in his summer wear and tries to kill them, Bourne reaches for those fake passports and heads off to put a stop to this once and for all.

Every time I watch this film I find another reason to love it. This time round, it was the way the locations tell the story. After that short and sweaty opening sequence in Goa, the film is set in Berlin and Moscow. A dark past, an ambiguous present, loneliness and anonymity – those cities are Bourne, those cold streets, those frozen rivers and nightmare-sized apartment blocks. Matt Damon doesn’t have many lines in this film. He doesn’t need them.

The denouement of Supremacy is particularly brilliant. Not the smug victory that closes most Hollywood action films, but a quiet moment of truth-telling and compassion, just as gripping as the frenetic car chase that precedes it.

The Bourne films are not exactly treatises of non-violence, but they aren’t far off. He’s on a search for redemption from his past sins and on the way, exposing the corruption of the powers that be. He was given a ‘licence to kill’ by his abusive spymasters but unlike his British counterpart, Bourne is trying to break the cycle of violence. In The Bourne Ultimatum, when he asks the goon sent by the CIA to kill him, ‘do you even know why you’re supposed to kill me?’, the question, surely, is directed at the wayward post-9/11 foreign policies of the US. Did America know what it was doing in all those violent, far-flung escapades anymore? Had it ever known?

Bourne is an archetype, a bit like another man in black, Johnny Cash (or how we imagine Johnny Cash): a man on the run, fighting his demons and the world around him while trying find his way into the light. And who isn’t? We’re all driving through the night to Berlin, in search of clues to who we are, what we should be sorry for, who is trying to screw with us, what we can hope for. For a brainwashed super-soldier assassin with amnesia, he’s pretty universal.

All the more reason to get excited that Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon have announced there’ll be another one released in 2016! Cue ‘Bourne again/re-Bourne’ puns. Cue the duh-duh-duh-duh music and a nice new short-back-and-sides. If it even gets close to Supremacy, I’ll be happy.