El Mayimbe’s Monday Morning Script Reviews Presents

The Bourne Supremacy
By
Tony Gilroy
Based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
Draft dated: 07/11/03

Rating:

El Mayimbe and the Kewl Kelvin gang over here at Latino Review bring you yet ANOTHER script review from ANOTHER highly anticipated film. The hits just keep coming and coming (I sound like a radio station promo). Before we get started, I want to send greetings and thanks to all my Mayimbe’s Maniacs from all around the world (Diablo! I got fans in Turkey, England, Brazil, etc) who have made my column an OVERWHELMING success.

Special shout out’s go out to my boys: Garth from Dark Horizons, Jo-Blo, Nick at Chud, Coming Soon. Good looking out and thanks for the links.

This was a pretty interesting read. Very little dialogue and lots of action. LOTS. The review for this one will be short because the writer spends lots of time writing pages and pages of detail for a scene when for review purposes all I have to say is, “They fight.” Don’t get me wrong, a lot of stuff happens but I won’t give you the details of the action, just the broad sense of what happens. I don’t need to break down the fight as it happens.

Remember in the last Bourne film how Damon gets down and dirty with his fists? Hong Kong style and all? Well, there is a lot more of that on display in the sequel. Honestly, the way this script was written was peculiar to me because it was written in an unconventional style that I’m not used to reading that perhaps made Gilroy a millionaire in the action genre. For example, Gilroy doesn’t use sluglines for a scene like:

INT. GARAGE – DAY

No, Gilroy just starts the line with

AN UNDERGROUND GARAGE.

Stuff like that. You can say that the script reads like a novel of sorts. To make matters more interesting my script source sent me like a poorly photocopied version of the script. But don’t get me wrong. It’s the real deal with the Universal copyright thing on the front.

*SPOLIER WARNING*

Even though I try to keep spoilers to a minimum, THERE IS A MAJOR SPOILER in the 1st act of this script that drives the story. That unfortunately I have to reveal or else I won’t be able to the review. But for all you Ludlum fans out there who have read the novels, it won’t come as a surprise, you guys already knows what happens in the beginning.

Speaking of UNDERGROUND GARAGES, it’s where the movie starts off. Where? It’s Rome but we don’t know that yet. We have a VOICEOVER of BOURNE describing his actions and setting in the scene in the garage until he hears the VOICE of MARIE calling out to him and the next thing you know we are in:

INDIA

Bourne is chilling, eating some spicy curry chicken, sporting a Punjabi turban and waiting for his cue to make his appearance in the next big Bollywood Musical that will hit American public access television so that all the white kids can make fun of him.

PSYCHE!

C’mon guys I’m allowed a little fun! But for real, my man is in India in the bedroom of a little cottage in a beach town outside Goa at 3:12 in the morning jotting down in his notebook the last scene from the underground garage. MARIE tells him to come back to bed. They both look very different than last we saw them; his hair is long and dark, she’s a blonde. Apparently, Bourne still has his memory issues from the last film, so when he remembers something, he jots it down in his notebook. Bourne says that he keeps having these dreams, Marie replies it’s the same dream over and over.

Next we are at a quiet ROMAN STREET. A taxi pulls up to the curb in front of a large office building. A MAN we shall call IVAN gets out. He is under surveillance from a nearby apartment and at THE COMMAND POST APRTMENT where we meet HELEN LANDY [Joan Allen], Senior Counter Intelligence. Officer of the C.I.A. Her #2 guy PALMER and the techs KURT and KIM. Apparently, a trade is going to go down that is also being monitored back at the C.I.A situation room in Langley, Virginia. The C.I.A. is supposed to buy old KGB files for $4 million dollars. The C.I.A’s guy VIC waits in a hallway for Ivan who is coming up the elevator to make the exchange. The elevator doors open, they meet, Ivan wants to see the money, and Vic shows it to him: RUSSIAN DOCUMENT FILES.

A CASPIEX INNER OFFICE. Curtains drawn. Vic with the documents. Ivan with the samples case, counting the cash. Suddenly, -- MUSIC – a radio – some Italian pop tune just started playing from somewhere down the hall. Both of them sure they’re being double-crossed. Wrong. SNAPPH! Five fast, suppressed small caliber shots –

Vic falls first –

Ivan crashing back over a desk as bullets tear into him –

Both of them dead before they hit the floor and –

BOURNE behind them. He’s the shooter. Except…

IT’S NOT JASON BOURNE!

It’s close. Close in size, weight. Blonde – the brush cut – the jaw – all close enough to have fooled us through the shadowy infiltration, maybe even close enough to fool a passing security camera, but this is not Jason Bourne.

Call him MOCK-BOURNE.

He’s all business. Like a machine. Already in motion before we know what’s happened – pulling a climbing duffel out from his back pack – stuffing in THE SMAPLES CASE and IVAN’S BRIEFCASE – all the files – all the money…

He kills the power. Command post freaks out. Mock-Bourne escapes into the night. That’s pretty much the 1st eleven pages. DISSOLVE TO

A BEACH ROAD OUTSIDE GOA. Morning in India. The real Bourne takes his morning jog on the beach. Back at the cottage Kitchen, Marie pulls out a kettle. She’s alone. Just out of bed. She looks at a snapshot of her and Jason. Young, alive, and in love. She gets nosey and then she goes and gets Jason’s scribble notebook. She looks through it. His memory book. Trouble is, these are all memories of assassinations. There are four of these “chapters” of victims. Then there is a fifth one, which is unknown.

CHAOS. Italian Medical Orderlies trying to wheel TWO BODYBAGS through a noisy crowd of cops and Reporters and – WE’RE BACK IN ROME. The street outside the office building is now a crime scene. Palmer wants to get in. Helen is working on it. Mock-Bourne now is a suit and tie driving a Mercedes out the way he must have come in the evening before. Nice and easy. Cruising right past PALEMR as we cut to

INDIA. Bourse outside a tea shop/cafe drinking water. Marie is there having lunch with two of her friends. Bourne gets paranoid and scopes the area. Cut to THE COTTAGE. Minutes later. Bourne gathers all his shit, puts it in the backpack, breaks out of his cottage, runs down the streets and stuffs the bag inside a squalid little shack. Bourne’s major stash. A very well stocked escape package for he and Marie. Later on, he goes home, goes over to the bathroom and has one of his flashback panic attacks.

Marie comes home. She notices that the stuff is gone. She gets pissed. She wants to know where her sketchbook is. Jason gets on her for having lunch with her friends. He tells her that they have to be careful. She has just about had it with Jason’s paranoia. They get into a big fight and she storms out of the house. Jason follows her out into a crowded street. She runs away across the square.

WARNING! BIG SPOLIER UP AHEAD [Highlight to read]

There is an accident. A Bus crushes one car, sideswipes another, jumps the curb, and runs into a row of street vendors. People screaming all over. Car horns blare.

MARIE – in the street – laying there – she’s not moving – there’s no blood, but she looks bad – bent – wrong -- Jason runs up to her – frantic – searches for a pulse – there’s nothing. He keeps looking for signs of life.

BOURNE rises from his knees. Looking down at MARIE’S BODY. Her eyes are fixed, and her skin’s gone cold. She’s dead and he knows it. Standing there. Total shock.

END SPOLIER

Here Bourne becomes an honorary Latino. Bourne snaps. He loses it and goes up to the bus driver and gets Puerto Rican on that ass and starts kicking the shit out of the bus driver. The cops react. Nightsticks start raining down on Bourne and we cut to –

ROME. THE COMMAND POST APARTMENT. The investigation continues. Mock-Bourne left a file with the heading: TREADSTONE

Back in jodido India. Bourne gets arrested. He’s in a holding cell. The Indian authorities discover that his Belgian passport is fake and that he better tell them who he is because he messed the bus driver pretty badly. Bourne stays silent.

Back at C.I.A. headquarters, Helen and her team go to the storage area and investigate TREADSTONE. Back in India Bourne is taken to perhaps the shittiest prison in India, VIHAR PRISON. Bourne then goes to the Mess hall and we are introduced to India’s finest and nastiest criminals, but Jason doesn’t care. Jason makes friends with an Indian prisoner named SAJIT. The next six pages is the obligatory prisoners fuck with the new inmate scene, but what’s cool about this one is that Jason is no ordinary criminal. A bunch of gangbangers mess with Jason and he pounds the shit out of all of them of course because he is a highly trained C.I.A. assassin.

Back at C.I.A. headquarters Helen interrogates ABBOTT and we find out what TREADSTONE was about but I ain’t telling because I already gave you a big spoiler. What we do find out in this scene is that the killer (Mock-Bourne) of the two spy dudes killed in the beginning left a fingerprint on a timing charge that didn’t go off, that of JASON BOURNE! He’s been framed!

It is now that time my friends that we come to the midpoint of the script which is where I end the review for you guys because you have to leave some elements to surprise and discovery. That’s the beauty of the movies. Overall, a tightly paced (but weirdly written) action thriller. Gilroy and his pen are no joke. Will Bourne escape from prison? Who is the real Mock-Bourne and what is his agenda? Will Jason get his memory and his life back? How will he prove his innocence to the C.I.A?

Gotta wait and see till the movie comes out later this year.

Coming up next week? A script review of a movie with Orlando Bloom in it. Can you guess which one it is?

Hasta el proximo capitulo!

El Mayimbe
elmayimbe@latinoreview.com