"The Bourne Supremacy" is a spy thriller for espionage fans who feel that James Bond has gone soft in the head (not to mention the abdomen). Cold, kinetic and featuring enough careening, hand-held camera work to upset anyone with a delicate stomach, "Bourne" is an adult action movie that will rattle your equilibrium, pound your eardrums and leave your emotions as you found them. Bourne doesn't want your sympathy.

The new film picks up the action two years after its predecessor, Doug Liman's slightly superior "Bourne Identity," left off. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is living with girlfriend Marie (Franka Potente) in coastal India. They're hiding from Bourne's assassin past, but you can't be a stone-cold killer like Bourne and avoid having some bad people - and bad karma - constantly on your doorstep. His suitcase must remain packed.

In the film's first half-hour alone, the action bounces back between India, Germany, Russia, the United States, Italy and England. The central plot point in all this continent hopping involves a couple of CIA agents being killed in Berlin, with the assassin leaving Bourne's fingerprint behind to frame him. Now, various Langley operatives want to either kill Bourne - the bullying Ward Abbott (Brian Cox, returning) favors this approach - or, at the very least, make his life a living hell.

The whole movie then revolves around Bourne using his expert abilities to make a series of narrow escapes throughout the Continent. Good enough. Director Paul Greengrass ("Bloody Sunday") knows how to shoot a chase scene, putting you alongside Bourne or inside his car. Sure, Greengrass and his editing go more than a little overboard with their hyper-caffeinated cutting of the film, but you can live with it because the action pulsates with an urgency that almost matches the throbbing techno music playing on the soundtrack.What makes this "Bourne" a bit of a snore is the relative lack of intrigue (it's not difficult to pin the tail on the bad guys) and the fact that, this time around, Bourne's amnesia isn't as dramatically interesting or emotionally involving enough to generate our sympathy. This isn't Damon's fault, plenty convincing as the killer with pitch-perfect, grim-faced gravity. It is what it is, and if you can roll with the punches (Bourne sure can) and cope with the shaky camera work, you'll enjoy riding shotgun with this lethal weapon.