The Bourne sequel. Admittedly, the basic premise of an amnesiac spy who remembers none of his assignments but all of his training is intrinsically ridiculous, internally illogical. (His unusual handicap -- groping along a fogbound Memory Lane -- never seems to slow him down, never lets his scheming adversaries get ahead of him.) But one of the side benefits of sequels is that any quarrel with a basic premise will tend eventually to die down -- or get worn down. We get used to it and over it. Or we just get tired of quarrelling. And, at least for a fair distance, this sequel is fast, ferocious, diverting -- yet in the end, and after it, unsatisfying and unsustaining. That strain of incongruous, incompatible sentimentality that so weakened the first film lingers on in the second, despite the early exit of Franka Potente and her civilizing, softening, feminine influence. And the climactic car chase in Moscow is perfectly laughable: every law-enforcement vehicle in the city is hot on our hero's tail and still he manages, after four or five neck-snapping collisions, to find some "alone time" with the very assassin who took a shot at him at the start of the film in India. And -- an early and unrelenting quarrel -- while the replacement of Doug Liman as director is no great loss, the choice of his actual replacement is highly questionable: Paul Greengrass, maker of the British docudrama Bloody Sunday. In the best of circumstances, his sloppy, scrambling, pseudodocumentary camera style would be a poor fit for so cool and controlled and perfectionist a hero. But this hero is more than just that. Greengrass seems to be laboring under the same misapprehension as Liman the first time: that he is presiding over an exposé of the spy racket rather than over a paean to its supreme practitioner. The title of the sequel can only be read as a coronation. Matt Damon, Brian Cox, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd