director
Doug Liman
screenwriters
Tony Gilroy
William Blake Herron
based on
the novel by
Robert Ludlum
producers
Patrick Crowley
Richard N. Gladstein
Doug Liman
cinematographer
Oliver Wood
music
John Powell
editor
Saar Klein
cast
Matt Damon (Jason Bourne)
Franka Potente (Marie Kreutz)
Clive Owen (The Professor)
Chris Cooper (Ted Conklin)
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Wombosi)
Julia Stiles (Nicolette)
Brian Cox (Ward Abbott)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 113m
u.s.
release: 6/14/02
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other doug
liman films
reviewed on this website:
- go
- mr.
and mrs. smith
- swingers
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Thoroughly cool (scene for
scene) and just as thoroughly forgettable, The Bourne Identity
has some of the pared-down, businesslike thrills of Ronin
but little of its personality. You enjoy it while you're there,
but once you've seen it, you've seen it -- you don't feel as
though there are secrets and meanings tucked away in dark corners,
as you do with a more artful thriller like Christopher Nolan's
Memento
(or his more recent movie, Insomnia).
Many, indeed, will compare this film to Memento, and for
good reason: Both are about mysterious protagonists who can't
remember anything, and who, we suspect, don't want to
remember. But Memento immersed the audience in the hero's
disorientation, while The Bourne Identity is just another
thrill ride, though a reasonably well-crafted one.
Something about Matt Damon
-- his mixture of hard and soft features, maybe -- has compelled
directors to put him in one identity crisis after another. He
seems both defined and blank, which works well for his character
here, Jason Bourne, who has no memory of who he is but knows
he has certain talents for survival. He has six different passports
(under different names) stashed away, he finds (to his surprise)
that he can speak a variety of languages, and when cornered he
instinctively lashes out in devastating self-defense -- it's
as if his mind forgot who he is but his body remembers
very well.
The CIA, led by a frowning
Chris Cooper, wants to find Bourne, or kill him, or both. Bourne
isn't sure which, so he flees to Paris, along with a German drifter
named Marie (Franka Potente, of Run
Lola Run), whom he entices with $10,000 and the promise
of more. For Marie, the trip soon becomes less about the money
than about the adventure; though Marie's character is drawn even
more sketchily than Bourne's, the dynamic and entrancing Potente
gives the movie a badly needed shot of what-the-hell spirit.
Terrified in moments of danger, Marie nonetheless gets it together
enough to yell at an assassin, demanding to know where he got
her picture. Potente also lends the movie a good helping of Euro-style,
particularly after her hair is cropped short and dyed black and
she appears in a black turtleneck; she's like a beatnik in the
middle of a blockbuster, and she's just irrefutably cool.
Written by Tony Gilroy and
William Blake Herron, based on a Robert Ludlum thriller (it was
adapted before as a 1988 miniseries, with Richard Chamberlain),
The Bourne Identity doesn't bother much with the reality
of what it might be like to discover gradually that one
is, at the very least, a highly skilled government agent of some
sort, or maybe worse. Damon slips into foreign tongues and has
the wit to show a flash of bemusement -- "I know
this?" he might be thinking -- but I would've liked to have
seen him feeling triumphant, or horrified, or something,
in the aftermath of his violence. Director Doug Liman, in a sharp
change of pace from his earlier Swingers
and Go,
doesn't seem interested in Bourne's morality; he's just along
for the ride.
And it's occasionally a satisfying
one. Bourne's reflexive genius at getting out of any sticky situation
becomes something of a joke (one that I wish we were encouraged
to share in); he has a brief, savage bout with an assassin in
a hotel room, and a nicely staged encounter with another assassin
in a field of tall grass. There's also a supremely bumpy car
chase over the cobblestones of Paris that -- perhaps because
Franka Potente is riding shotgun, caught between panic and ecstasy
-- manages to be strangely charming. The Bourne Identity
does the job, but it's a very basic job; I can't work up a lot
of respect for a movie that relegates fine actors like Brian
Cox, Julia Stiles, and the imposing Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
(late of HBO's prison series Oz) to glorified walk-ons.
The movie is about muscular speed and skill, and that's all it's
about. Like its hero, it's blank by design.
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