Bourne Identity
The spy movie genre had become somewhat mired due for the most part to the Bond Franchise, an ongoing mélange of a top secret agent happily doing his job for Queen and Country against the most notorious set of villains imaginable. Most real world scenarios though, would paint a different picture, that of a spy / assassin who’s most likely overtrained to the point of exhaustive perfection, living in a world where he would be a loner in society just waiting on that next call or text that would spring him into action to engage in an act of cold blooded murder for some obscure reason at the behest of his government. That concept of isolated misery in this line of work and the effect that it can have on someone was the basis of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne novels, admittedly from a different post-Vietnam Cold War era and of which were the inspiration for the Jason Bourne franchise, starting off in 2002 with this first flick starring Matt Damon as the titular character (with Damon being a LOT younger than Bourne was in the books) and seeming to question the morality of whether a government should be playing God when it comes to knocking off someone who might be a threat to them or even having them “suicide” themselves, so much so that the main target for assassination in the story (an African dictator / power broker whom it would appear has made a lot of noise) is almost portrayed as an afterthought compared to focusing on the torment that these assassins go through in order to do their job right. The story begins with Damon’s Bourne floating face down in The Mediterranean Sea, not quite dead but amazingly not drowned when he is picked up by a fishing boat and brought back to shore while suffering from amnesia. Having had the bullets in him removed and finding the account code for a bank in Switzerland in his name, Bourne soon finds that he has almost inhuman hand to hand fighting skills and that it seems everywhere he goes there are various police and trained killers trying to hunt him down and take him out. He soon acquires the contents of the bank’s safety deposit box in his name, finding a slew of various passports, money, and a gun. Still being hunted, he hooks up with a wandering German gypsy (Franka Potente, having just gotten famous for Run Lola Run and looking gorgeous here), the type who aimlessly tools all over Europe without any real direction mostly because that is the type of life which she prefers to live, and offers her $10,000 to drive him to Paris since apparently he has an apartment there. But unfortunately the CIA has IDed her as well, leading to more attacks (which Bourne expertly fends off even from his own highly trained fellow assassins since he apparently was the best of the lot) as the two of them desperately try to figure out their next move. The funny thing about the movie is that while it’s fast paced and much of the CIA intrigue is great stuff, a lot of the action sequences that basically show Bourne getting from Point A in the story to Point B is fairly standard stuff even if it’s well directed by Doug Liman (who clashed so often with the studio and went way over budget that he was happily replaced for the sequels) but it always seems to fade from memory within minutes as we continue with the character development and plot building. Naturally, a romance ensues between Damon and Potente that feels more built on convenience rather than on chemistry or attraction, especially when the hottest babe in the movie turns out to be Julia Stiles as the CIA point girl in Paris who apparently oversees directly all the operations as it pertains to the hunting down of Bourne. We also have Chris Cooper looking as if he could use three cups of coffee as the head of the special assassins’ program (and who apparently ordered the hit on the African leader without notifying his superiors) looking to have Bourne taken out not only to do damage control but to seriously cover his own ass as well. As things go on, we learn that Bourne and the others were the result of a special training program known as Treadstone, where (as we learn more in the sequels) assassins were heavily mentally conditioned as well as physically and trained in the use of weapons, being made to forget almost everything about their past lives (and being given a new name) along with apparently losing the baggage of such human emotions like remorse and guilt, a program whose training costs are said to amount to $30 million PER PERSON but which in the end produces the “perfect” assassin (even as Bourne’s fresh case of amnesia makes him more confused and thus maybe even more dangerous than he was before) but the nature of the program is just so top secret that even the mention of all these incidents being connected to it reaching the upper levels of power could be disastrous, as seen by the higher ranking official (Brian Cox) who also becomes worried for his job and personal security even as he would return in the sequel to take on and play a more sinister role than he does here. Even as Bourne continues to revel in the torment of not knowing who he was or why, he finds all of his old abilities (even those of a trivial nature) coming back to him thus showing that in many ways the advanced training had actually been a success and also why the government would never want someone like that going rogue and galloping around doing pretty much whatever he wanted. Of course, the central theme of the entire series would ultimately become these types of assassins for whom the intense training had “changed” them (for the worst?) now seeking some kind of a “revenge” on the government who had recruited them and put them through the wringer and possibly destroying their souls in the process as part of the quest to create “perfect” killers that would give them the upper hand when it came to international espionage. It’s clear that this film was made with the obvious intentions of making sequels that would further explain the entire mythology and inner workings of how all this came about, but first off here we are expected to be content with watching Bourne engage in a one sided game of cat and mouse with another master assassin (Clive Owen) whom he deftly outsmarts, tracks down and kills even as Owen blubbers while he’s dying and gives away some crucial information that leads to Bourne setting up a fateful meeting with Cooper’s character for the final showdown. It’s not terribly suspenseful by any means, but it gets the job done in showing the Bourne character trying to connect with what had once made him human. Not exactly the high living, playboy lifestyle of bedding down one woman after another with a clear conscience like Bond had enjoyed. But the gritty, non glamorous nature of the story is probably what struck a chord for so many here and Damon’s own combination of confused vulnerability and steely intensity (when called for) were most likely the key to this film’s success as well as the franchise’s. Even as Ludlum had died before the film’s premiere, the changes made to his story from the original novel (such as Bourne being used as a decoy to draw out a much more evil and feared assassin) may have actually improved things greatly in raising it above Tom Clancy level material and bringing everything into a new realm for this genre, with the only question being if it could sustain the momentum through all the sequels (including one with Jeremy Renner starring as a Bourne type assassin) and continue improving upon what was started here. But nothing can change or deny the fact that a new style and method was created with this film, an action movie better enhanced by its plot and character development rather than by its action sequences, a different take on how much more of a tortured soul a highly trained assassin is, so highly trained in fact that his very humanity is taken out of him, and whether treating them like dogs released from a kennel rather than having the best of everything is really the proper way to go about things in the business of defending your country’s honor…
8/10