Another film “based on” a book with which it has little in common except the title and the names of some of the characters. Nevertheless, it dovetails well with the first movie (which also had little in common with the book on which it was “based”), and explains several details that were unclear to me when I saw that first Bourne film.

A CIA op in Berlin goes bad when an operative and his contact are shot and Jason Bourne’s fingerprint is found at the scene. Meanwhile, Bourne (Matt Damon) and his inamorata Marie (Franka Potente) are thousands of miles away in Goa, enjoying a life of lotus-eating and (for Bourne) nightmares related to what he might or might not have done before being hit with amnesia. Luckily, this is not enough to damage his assassin’s “edge”, and he immediately sights the hit-man Kirill (Karl Urban) who has been sent to Goa to off him. During the escape, Marie is killed, and so Bourne sets out to avenge her in an odyssey that takes him first to Naples, then to Berlin, climactically to Moscow, and, for the denouement, home to New York. In the course of this journey, Bourne begins to lose some (though not all) of his edge, and at the same time starts to discover something about his past and something of the motivations, not always patriotic in nature, of those who issued his orders.

I was less than enthralled with the first movie (The Bourne Identity), largely because it did not follow the book — which was unavoidable; the original plot depended to a great extent on the vileness and sheer evil of the murder mastermind Carlos the Jackal, who in the meantime turned out to be pretty small potatoes (makes one wonder what history will decide about Osama bin Laden, doesn’t it!), and so the plot of the movie had to be modified to give Treadstone a different raison d’être and Bourne a very different history and character. But the second movie carries on the story of the first so well — again, with little reference to the novel — that I found it much more compelling. But, caveat: while there have been at least three books in the series (though they do not form a trilogy, as at least one reviewer suggested), this movie, while it makes it possible for a third film, with a new plot, to be released, does not require or, in my opinion, encourage one. The story started in The Bourne Identity has now been pretty well tied up; all that is left is Jason Bourne.

But maybe that’s enough.