[With The Bourne Legacy set to open this Friday, we'll be taking a look back at the original Bourne trilogy.  These reviews will contain spoilers since the movies have been out for years.  Click here for my review of The Bourne Identity.]

The identity of the Bourne franchise begins in the third act of The Bourne Identity.  It’s when the character’s strengths and weaknesses begin to arise, and The Bourne Supremacy director Paul Greengrass took note of where not only the character was going, but where America was going.  The Bourne Identity came out in June 2002, and the sense of our country’s post-9/11 world was still hazy.  By the time The Bourne Supremacy arrived on July 23, 2004, the reverberations were clear.  We had been led into a war based on faulty intelligence that was cherry-picked so that we could attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.  Greengrass wasn’t obligated to insert the subtext into his spy thriller, but he was savvy enough to leave the political commentary simmering underneath an intense action flick that not only boosted Matt Damon‘s credibility as a kick-ass hero, but found a way to use hand-held cinematography to its full effect rather than a lazy shortcut.