Rambo in the City.

Rating: 7/10 (10 December 2006)

You remember, I'm sure, how John Rambo was a practically superhuman expert at surviving and killing in the forest? And he was hunted by a horde of ill-motivated nincompoops and outwitted all of them in the mountains of Washington? Well, "The Bourne Identity" is like that, except that its setting is urban and its a far less stupid movie. It's an action move alright, but not a stupid one. You can tell it's an action movie because there is a speedy car chase through the streets of Paris, and because the hero can cause a fuel tank to explode simply by shooting at it with a shotgun. You can tell it's not stereotypical because there are a number of physical fights in which one or another participant's pistol is knocked out of his hand -- and in no case is there a shot of the gun skittering along the floor. And neither does the hero bump his head against an adversary's head in defiance of Newton's third law.
Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is hauled out of the sea with a bullet wound and amnesia. He spends the movie, along with the girl friend he acquires (Potente) trying to find out who he is, a "born" identity, so to speak. Meanwhile he's being hunted in the most thorough and high-tech sort of way by the CIA, who was to whack him for having failed to complete a hit. They're afraid he'll spill the beans, you see, and of course the police are after him too for various infractions committed in the course of his quest.
I quite liked the movie. The atmosphere of wintry Switzerland and Paris are nicely set up. Whew, it looks cold. The performances are fine, especially the two leads and Chris Cooper at the CIA honcho. Oh, I suppose we can all have doubts that the CIA are quite so good at what they do, but this story is fictional.
The action scenes, mostly mano a mano, don't drag on. They happen suddenly and are lightning-fast. The script is literate in the sense that people do and say things that are believable. Potenta's voice is especially neat to listen to. Her German-tinted sarcasm is perfectly believable.
Matt Damon, well, he looks perhaps a bit like a ex-preppy whose most violent endeavors involved a tennis ball but his performance is fine, as it usually is. And although Chris Cooper's part isn't overly large, I think it's one of his best roles. He has an amazing range considering what he brings with him -- from efficiently slimy here to gentle and sensitive in something like "Lone Star." And though the plot is propelled by a set of less than plausible propositions, compare it to "Rambo," in which everything hinges on the revenge motive (if that's what it is) of one big hulking brute of an irritable sheriff.
It's a well-crafted action movie with no great ethical moral embedded in it. I hope not anyway. If there were a message it would have to be something like, "Who are we, really?" That's pretty banal unless it's treated as an absurdity, as in Georg Buchner's "Woyzeck," in which, when the hero becomes conscious, he asks something like, "Who am I? Where am I? Why am I?" I'm not sure why, on the DVD, the director keeps drawing our attention to the "realism" of the script while, at one point, he tells us that nobody was shown smoking in the movie because he didn't want to provide bad role models for kids, even though the entire French crew had Gauloise stubs glued to their lips. What price political correctness?
Technically I suppose this is what I'd call a "latent status movie," in which the hero has the status of a highly skilled craftsman but doesn't reveal it until circumstances force him to. Shane's latent status was that of a skilled gunslinger. Richard Kimball's was that of a doctor. This is a higher-order latent status movie in that, not only do his friends not know of Bourne's secret identity as a superb assassin, but Bourne has amnesia and doesn't know it himself. (Suppose, though, Bourne's secret identity turned out to be that of manager of a Sonic Drive-Thru in Amarillo or something?)
This has nothing to do with the movie but there is a director's audio commentary on the DVD. I do wish directors would do more than tell us which scenes were shot on location and which on a sound stage, and stop telling us how incredible everyone was on the set. Why not point out goofs, weaknesses, and conflicts as well? They're equally interesting.
I recommend it, and I recommend taking a second look at Franka Potente, a young German woman whose appearance would not pass muster next to Brittny Spears or Jessica Alba but who has an inner beauty as well as a hell of a lot more talent than most of today's tabloid heroines. She does have one major flaw -- her name. I keep getting it mixed up with Famke Janssen and Battleship Potemkin and Mandy Potamkin and Frankie Sinatra and the name of a Chevrolet dealership in New Jersey. She'll have to change it.