The Bourne Supremacy: Suspense thriller. Starring Matt Damon, Joan Allen, Brian Cox and Franka Potente. Directed by Paul Greengrass. (PG-13. 108 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

Almost everything that made "The Bourne Identity" refreshing -- the wit, the irony, the suspense, the novelty of its premise -- is gone in "The Bourne Supremacy," and what's left is the spectacle of Matt Damon, with perfect posture and senses primed like a cat, making his way through a routine action thriller. That isn't bad, but it is disappointing for anyone who remembers what made the first movie so enjoyable.

If director Doug Liman brought a new sensibility to "The Bourne Identity, " giving the action a faintly absurdist edge, Paul Greengrass, who directed the sequel, brings an old-time sensibility, a straight-ahead, dead seriousness. He couples this approach with two chronic mistakes in strategy: He consistently forgets to clue the audience in on basic information, such as who is shooting at whom, and why. And he films every action scene as though doing a behind-the-camera interpretive dance based on Don Knotts' classic performance in "The Shakiest Gun in the West."

That "The Bourne Supremacy" is still fairly entertaining (as in, definitely watchable) is a testament to the durability of formula: An innocent man is unfairly targeted for assassination by nefarious secret agents, foreign and domestic. More interestingly, it's a testament to Damon and what his physical presence somehow just conveys. To see him hurrying through a market in India or even running from security in Berlin is to see a big, corn-fed American kid, now grown up and in serious trouble. It's to see someone whom no one in the audience has to be talked into rooting for. It's instinctive.

Two years have passed since we last saw Jason Bourne. At the start of the film he is living in a corner of India with his German girlfriend, Marie (Franka Potente). Despite the remote location, his hair looks perfect. Maybe Marie gives him daily trims. But hair is the least of his worries. He still can't remember his past. He still has nightmares. He wakes up in a sweat, burning up with fever -- and this is before anything bad happens.

And then bad happens, way bad and all at once. One morning in a village market, he sees a car, takes one look at the driver, and his trained killer's instinct tells him that something isn't right. A chase ensues, and in the aftermath Jason knows he isn't safe. There are people after him, and he has to find them before they find him.

The main person looking for him is Joan Allen as a CIA boss named Pamela, who thinks that Bourne killed two of her agents, when in fact Bourne was miles away at the time, probably getting a haircut. She reassembles the team that worked earlier on the Bourne case, including Abbott, a CIA veteran with dark secrets, who just wants Bourne dead. Abbott is played by Brian Cox, who has picked up the baton dropped by the late J.T. Walsh as Hollywood's exemplar of the powerful, untrustworthy man.

The title, "The Bourne Supremacy," promises something it doesn't deliver, something further suggested by the advertising tagline, "They should have left him alone." The title suggests a reversal of the first movie, with Bourne, in possession of himself and the facts, mounting an offensive against the people who've victimized him. But the movie is really a muddle. Bourne is improvising, getting shot at here, strangling somebody there. He has no system. Anyway, there's really no villain, unless you count some nameless Russian assassin or poor Abbott, who is too much of a nervous wreck to inspire an audience's bloodlust. And though Pamela is ostensibly working against Bourne, Allen's undisguisable probity makes it impossible to mistake her for a bad guy.

This moral messiness, this whole spectacle of confusion, could have been made into a virtue had the director approached the story with some ironic distance. But the only distance Greengrass creates is that which comes of bad technique: wobbly images, blurred fragments. And we're in no position to appreciate the irony of the situation if we have no idea what's going on.

-- Advisory: This film contains violence and some strong language.