One of the more lamentable cinematic fads of the last few years has been the use of the “Shaky-Cam,” that unstabilized, handheld camera perspective that looks like what you could expect if you turned over your Super8 to a caffeine-buzzed four-year-old. When used sparingly, this technique can provide a sense of immediacy, a “you-are-there” feeling. The problem is that many modern (and presumably younger) filmmakers are too enamored of the device. Basically, they use it too much, even in situations when it simply isn’t necessary, no doubt because they think that having the picture jerk and weave like a punch-drunk boxer will give their project that all-important “edge” that appeals to the skateboard-and-Xbox crowd. Combine the shaky-cam with the curious reluctance of modern directors to shoot anything from a distance — I have a theory that everything is shot these days with the eventual DVD release in mind, so directors don’t want their actors to look too small on a television screen — as well as the hyperkinetic, post-MTV editing style that requires a jump-cut every two seconds, and you end up with quite a mess. You end up, in fact, with The Bourne Supremacy.

I really wanted to like this film. In a lot of ways, I did like it. I found the story interesting, the characters were fairly well-drawn, and Matt Damon is maturing into an interesting leading man. He’s very good here as Jason Bourne, a former secret agent who has lost most of his memories of his former life and wants nothing more than to be left alone. However, he’s soon forced back to the surface when some shady Russian mafia types murder a couple of CIA agents and frame Bourne for it. (You can tell they’re shady Russian mafia-types because of their grubby facial hair, which never seems to grow beyond about three days’ worth of stubble) With his former masters at the CIA hunting him, Bourne sets out to unravel the plot, clear his name and exact his revenge.

It’s a good set-up and the script alternates action with human pathos, and occasionally even finds room for some bittersweet humor (so many films of this nature are either lacking humor entirely, or it’s all of the tedious one-liner-delivered-after-shooting-someone variety). The plot holes aren’t excessively wide and the writers give the audience credit for having some degree of intelligence. Despite all these positives, however, I just can’t recommend the film.

The problem is entirely visual: the whole damn movie is shot in shaky-cam. All of it, beginning to end. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that’s so… jittery. Even The Blair Witch Project, the overrated and already forgotten grandmother of shaky-cam movies, wasn’t this bad. A perfect example of how The Bourne Supremacy operates is a simple shot of a guy opening a door and walking into a hotel room. This action, repeated in hundreds of other films, is usually accomplished with a minimum of camera movement or editorial trickery. What would be the point, after all? It’s just a guy entering a room. But in Bourne that action requires the camera to zoom in briefly, then pull back out, then there’s an editorial cut that takes us to a slightly closer angle, then to another angle, and the camera is in motion the whole time. And for what reason? None that I could see. This moment is simply a guy entering a room. There is absolutely no need for all the visual flourishes except that someone thought it looked cool or, more likely, that they thought the kids in the audience would think it looked cool.

This sort of thing was annoying during the movie’s quiet moments, but it became downright frustrating during the action scenes. One particular hand-to-hand fight sequence is especially bad. In an older action film — one of the early James Bond flicks, for example — this fight would’ve been filmed from across the room, so we could see both men clearly. We would’ve seen what they did with their bodies, how they interacted with each other and the objects in the room. If there was much camera movement or editing in this hypothetical older film, it would’ve been simple and designed to convey more information, not less. In The Bourne Supremacy, however, camera movement and editing seem designed to subtract information from the viewer. During this fight scene, we zoom in and out for no apparent reason and no shot is held longer than a second or two. In addition, the frame is in close, uncomfortably close, to our two fighters, and several times during the fight I simply couldn’t tell which man was which. They became nothing more than two man-shaped shadows rolling around on the floor. When Bourne grabs a household object to use as a weapon, I thought for a moment that it was a cordless telephone handset. It was, in fact, a magazine. I shouldn’t have had any problem telling the difference, and the fact that I did is why this movie failed for me. Give me a locked-off camera and a long, unbroken two-shot over this stuff any day…