“It’s not a mistake. They don’t make mistakes. They don’t do random. There’s always an objective. Always a target.”

Much like the first installment in the Bourne series, Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Supremacy is a serviceable thriller that features bone-jarring stunts, high speed car chases, and brutal hand to hand combat. It leans heavily into the frantic shaky cam antics that Doug Liman employed in the first film and provides several iconic moments for its hero. However, it lacks a meritorious story to undergird its high velocity rampage. This was a problem with the first film as well, stemming from the decision to use Ludlum’s general premise and not much else. With the invigorating mystery of Bourne’s identity in the rearview and the decision to deviate from the overarching story of the novels already made, the screenplay in the second film is threadbare and generic, functionally providing nothing more than a framework to move the amnesiac assassin around the globe for a series of physical conflicts.

The narrative picks up a couple years after the events of The Bourne Identity, with Jason (Matt Damon) and Marie (Franka Potente) having settled into anonymous lives in a seaside community in India. But they’ve grown lax, and in the film’s opening moments Bourne must contend with a hitman named Kirill (Karl Urban) who has tracked him to his island sanctuary. Bourne escapes with his life but Marie is slain by a bullet meant for him. The lovers’ underwater farewell is sapped of emotional impact due to Marie’s shallow characterization in the first film (although my wife momentarily sat in disbelief because Marie and Jason eventually have kids in the books). Her death prompts Bourne to follow through on his promise from the first film to retaliate if he was not left alone.

Meanwhile, just prior to Kirill’s mission to India, a CIA operation headed by Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) has gone bad. The details involve millions of dollars, a mole within the agency, and classified personnel files, but all that really matters is that two of her agents are killed by Kirill and Bourne’s fingerprints are planted on the scene. And so Bourne once again becomes the target of the CIA; but this time he’s also pursued by the Russian oligarch (Karel Roden) who sent Kirill on his botched mission.

At times, The Bourne Identity felt a little bit like an amped-up spy thriller. The Bourne Supremacy, by contrast, drops all pretenses of sophistication in favor of vengeful action. In the government offices, several actors reprise their roles—Brian Cox’s corrupt CIA Section Chief and former head of Treadstone; Julia Stiles’ logistics coordinator and mental health counselor; Gabriel Mann’s agency underling. But by and large, Bourne is facing off with an assortment of random one-off thugs who are introduced and dispatched in a matter of minutes. We can obviously forgive the lack of character development in the fringe players who serve as nothing more than orchestrators of action and/or fodder for Bourne’s rampage; but the shallowness of Bourne himself is quite telling of the film’s basic ambitions. Tidbits are thrown out here and there such as recurring memories of his first contract—but he’s not much more than a relentless killer for the bulk of the film, until the last few minutes when he goes out of his way to express remorse for his actions.

The requisite car chases, shoot outs, and fist fights are all included. The close-quarters combat feels particularly effective here, but just as before, it is obscured by a jittery camera, push-ins, zooms, kinetic movement, and an over-eager editing style that’s even more pronounced with Greengrass than it was with Liman. There are certain sequences where the hyperactive jump cutting style gives the scenes a nice sense of hectic momentum, but most of the action scenes devolve into nausea-inducing incoherence that is difficult to describe as anything but clumsy. And it’s not as if the style is meant to mirror the intensity of the moment. Even when Bourne sits in an Internet cafe scouring the web for info, the camera is bobbing and weaving like a skittish boxer.

The primary issue with The Bourne Supremacy (and I suspect this will continue to plague the series) is the lack of a throughline. There are certain expectations that inevitably come with adaptation that are not met. Initially presented as a trilogy, one could be forgiven for anticipating a coherent story that develops over the course of three films. And many, myself included, are perfectly willing to accept changes that are made to adapt a book to the cinematic medium. But the plot of The Bourne Supremacy is merely a pretext for running and gunning, insufficient as a building block for a larger story and not entertaining enough as a self-contained adventure à la Bond. That leaves us with a decently entertaining thriller but nothing more.