A first class action/thriller

Rating: Null/10 (22 June 2002)

"The Bourne Identity" is about as action packed, suspenseful a thriller as you are going to find and that's rather surprising, because the plot is not all that original, and not very difficult to figure out, even if you've never seen a movie like this before.
The plot has Matt Damon fished out of the ocean and finding that while he knows how to do all sorts of things, including speak a lot of languages (he's American?),he just can't remember his name or anything personal.
The rest of the tale is the unraveling of his past, which turns out to be all about his work as a CIA assassin.
Director Doug Liman does an excellent job with the almost non-stop action, which is expertly staged from start to finish. That includes a car chase through downtown Paris which puts to shame the one staged in "Ronin" by car chase expert John Frankinheimer. Liman's work is less precise in terms of the direction of actors, but then for the most part, they don't have all that much to do acting-wise.
Damon is fine as the man without a past. German actress Franke Potente (the redhead from "Run, Lola, Run") is even better as the girl who gets involved with him. She is actually given a little room to work and she does well, especially in a scene where she witnesses a brutal fight to the death, and finds she cannot just shrug it off as one more day in the office.
Some of the other casting falls a little flat, though. Chris Cooper, usually great, is somewhat miscast as the head of a CIA black ops group. The very talented Julia Stiles is given little to do as a Paris CIA operative(and looks much too young for the job) and Clive Owen, clearly British, sort of seems out of place as a CIA assassin.
But the action moves so fast that you hardly notice and overall,the picture succeeds very well,even though you pretty much know how its going to come out before the first reel is over.
I recommend the film highly.
But one final thought about it's timing. "The Bourne Identity" makes its debut as America continues to be caught up in the war on terrorism. That's interesting because this film is clearly about the CIA, which is depicted as a US government agency that assassinates foreign leaders, then blames the crimes on others; murders innocent civilians, and then lies to the American people when its leaders perjure themselves before Congress.
All this at a time when US intelligence agencies are arresting suspected terrorists and holding them incommunicado, at times saying it may not even grant them a trial. But we are told, trust these government agencies, we can believe them. They may have blown chance after chance to head off the 9-11 attacks, they may have muffed countless important cases in the past, they may have failed to predict any of the major events they had been looking out for since World War II, but don't worry, they've finally got it all right.
Sorry, the message in "The Bourne Identify" rings a lot truer than most of the pronouncements coming from real Washington officials about why we shouldn't mind that they are whittling away at the Bill of Rights. Robert Ludlum may be simply a novelist, but John Aschcroft is a failed politician(he was defeated in his bid for reelection to the Senate by a dead man) and Aschcroft is the one I don't trust.