Matt on the Run



Matt Damon plays the title role in "The Bourne Identity," a spy thriller that doesn't take much work to decipher.




The Bourne Identity is a movie that is as smart as last week’s non-starter Bad Company is dumb. Both are films that involve secret agents (or people pretending to be secret agents running around cobblestone European cities while bullets fly all around them. Both try to pick up collateral business on the names of their leads. But while Bad Company felt like a film trailer shoot where someone left the camera running, one critic has likened The Bourne Identity as what a James Bond movie would look like if it had been made for Sundance.




I agree with this in part, but it also happens to be the main thing that hobbles Bourne. Despite its high-road approach, neither film leaves much of an imprint and both, by the end, become rather tedious.




Director Doug Liman (Swingers, Go) is not one for taking the audience for granted and his carefulness shows here. However, the plot is a grist mill of things we’ve seen in every spy-on-the-run film ever made. There are the cadre of colorful assassins who keep popping up to do our hero in no matter where he goes. There is the girl who meets the hero under “normal” circumstances but, against all logic, decides to stick with him even when it becomes evident that this will likely get her shot. And then there is the Evil Field Director (Chris Cooper) whose job it is to stand in a bunker looking at monitors, shout at underlings, and complain that people aren’t dying in the way that he would prefer. The amnesia trip that Jason Bourne (a very relaxed Matt Damon) wakes up with after being fished out of the Mediterranean also seems like a pulpy crutch. I get the feeling a talented filmmaker like Liman could have made a much better movie than this if all the routines didn’t keep getting in the way.




The only thing Bourne has on him when he wakes up (other than two bullet wounds and a hell of a hangover) is a Swiss bank account number. Lucky, lucky for the guy who can’t even remember what his name is that the bank will open the account up to him with the just a handprint scan. And to think I still have to show two forms of I.D. What Bourne finds in his safe deposit box is the Insta-Spy-Kit: money, passports, and a gun. How the hell the gun got past the guards and metal detectors in the first place is a question I’ll leave for the philosophers, but this is already enough to convince Bourne that he didn’t just get a whack on the head while scuba diving. Even more troubling is the lack of hospitality that the local law enforcement establishments show in constantly trying to shoot him, and the fact he is able to break heads with a bone-crunching lickety-split-ness that would make Jackie Chan wince.




Once Bourne gets rolling on this tract, it doesn’t deviate- it goes through the motions: there is even the car chase with those tiny little European cars that look like they run on AA batteries. Even when this was done in Ronin this felt a little stale, and that movie used heavy artillery. Don’t get me wrong, The Bourne Identity doesn’t pander or dumb itself down. It simply does not inspire and looks more than a little rough around the edges. I know I’m about to commit a grievous act of sacrilege here, but what Bourne desperately needed was a healthy dose of gloss. More than anyone I despise it when style replaces substance, but good spy stories need a little polish to invite you inside of their world. Would you want to be James Bond if everything he did looked like it was shot on wax paper? Especially distracting are the scenes of the film that take place at CIA headquarters where Bourne’s handlers plan his fate. From the set design, one would guess that Langley, in reality, consists of all of, say, two rooms that are done up to look like the offices of the most unpleasant dot-com start-up on the planet.




The Bourne Identity gets some points over its competition; it isn’t as hollow as The Sum of All Fears nor as idiotic as Bad Company, but it is a mark of a creative filmmaker who, for one reason or another, decided to stick with predictable material. On the basis of Go alone I’ll bet that Liman will eventually build a body of work that will survive him- but The Bourne Identity won’t be part of it. B-