A marked improvement on The Bourne Identity, the sequel benefits greatly from a change in the director’s chair, as Paul Greengrass proves much more adept than his predecessor at this sort of film.

Doug Liman's direction, particularly when it comes to shooting the action sequences, is somewhat pedestrian, but Greengrass excels in that area, particularly with the car-chase in the final third. Everything here is remarkably tight; the pace and well-structured plot strands ensure that, like its titular character, The Bourne Supremacy is entirely flab-free.

The addition of the perennially-underrated Joan Allen to go head-to-head with Brian Cox’s panicky power-player spices up the departmental dynamics behind the scenes, as more is revealed about Bourne’s cloudy past, and the Treadstone experiment. Amnesia is a powerful plot tool, keeping the viewer on their toes and questioning the motivations of our unreliable central character, but the search for his identity in… well, Identity, gives way to a more insistent sense of self-doubt, making the bad-ass killing machine all the more relatable.

I debated over whether to give the film an extra half-star, and was almost entirely swayed by the line, “You're in a big puddle of shit… and you don't have the shoes for it.”