Beautiful action, mostly in beautiful Paris

Rating: 9/10 (25 July 2007)

It is first of all an action film in which the whole action goes wrong because the agent did not do what he was supposed to do, he did not kill his target and he got shot at and he lost his memory. The story is unluckily not entirely clear. He forgot his identity. Fine. He did not forget his physical training. Fine because that kind of training has been ingrained so deeply that it has become an instinct of sorts. But how did he remember he had a bank account in Zurich and the number of the bank account, and what's more why did not the CIA close the account since the operation had failed and the agent was supposed to be dead? This leads to more questions, but that is not really important for the action, though we like it absolutely clean. The message however is not altered at all. The CIA is able to train agents that have become plain robots and that can only succeed blindly in their mission or die or kill themselves if the first two options do not go through. These killing robots are in the hands of bureaucrats who are mostly incompetent and these bureaucrats are in the hands of politicians who are first and foremost rotten liars. The objective is simple: control the world with puppets who can be anything, democratic tyrants or tyrannical democrats, no matter which or their reverses, provided they serve well, otherwise they die and the human killing robots get into the picture. When this film came out the US were starting to get engaged in the war on terrorism. The picture of this CIA is pretty terroristic to me. We know now, several years later that it was not that competent in gathering information, though it did gather some, but we also know that the politicians who used the information they got were pretty liars and making the incomplete information they got say whatever they wanted it to say. Is that very democratic? At the end of the film, when the politician is engaged in some new lie to the Senate, we are just relieved because the killing robot agent, Jason Bourne, has finally gotten out of it and has been able to trace the girl he dragged into the adventure unaware of what he was really dragging her into. But the story cannot be finished because the CIA cannot let him live just like that out of the goodness of their heart, for one simple reason: they do not have a heart. In other words, the cold war is maybe finished, but the terroristic spying agencies, politically correctly named intelligence agencies, are still thriving and well. We have not yet reached the country of perfect transparency and total democracy. And we pretend to give lessons to the barbarians who are not part of our club! Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne