The Bourne Identity is a taut psychological thriller that explores the genre from a variety of new standpoints, but doesn't quite manage to be as great as it could have and should have been.

Rating: 8/10 (15 July 2002)

In one of the more anticipated thrillers released this year, Matt Damon takes on the role of a CIA assassin who has failed an assassination mission only to wake up and find himself on a strange fishing boat with no memory of who or where he is or how he even got there. It starts off under this immediately interesting premise, with Damon's character progressively educating himself about his identity through the gradual realization of his own ignorance to the true reality of who he is. The more he learns, the more he realizes that he doesn't know, as the saying goes. And we are more than willing to tag along and make all of these thrilling discoveries with him.

The movie has a remarkable amount of strong points, but almost as many weak points. It grows a little frustrating after a while as we learn how much Marie is willing to put up with in order to stay with this guy. It's kind of important that she's there because, as he said in the most amusing line in the film, she's the only person he knows. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that someone as good-looking as Franka Potente has been having such a hard time finding a boyfriend that she is willing to go through the car chases and gunfights and explosions that are involved with her new friend, who hasn't told her his name because he didn't even know it himself. And why did he pay her $20,000 for the ride to Paris? Did that serve any purpose in the film other than illustrating the massive amount of money that he has at his disposal?
On the one hand, it's easy to see how weak the scriptwriting is when we consider the real logistics of Marie deciding to stay by Jason's side (if that IS his real name) through all of this mess, but on the other hand, we are willing to forgive things like that because the rest of the movie is so good. Some of the action scenes are a little extensive, but even most of those are forgivable. There is a scene, for example, where Bourne pushes a man's body off of a flight of stairs and over a drop of four or five stories, is able to concentrate enough to shoot a guy a couple of flights down, and then uses the body as a sort of cushion to break his fall. This is something that I've always wondered about (I can't remember why, but I've wondered why I haven't seen someone do this in an action movie before. Maybe now I know why).
Now, if Bourne is capable of doing half the things that we've seen him do in this movie, I'm more than willing to believe that he could pull something like this off, although the landing didn't look real at all. Now all I need is to see more people simply shooting the guy who's holding a gun to a hostage's head, demanding escape. I'm sick and tired of seeing cops put their guns down and let the bad guy go instead of just shooting him in the head when they had him in their crosshairs. I saw Charlie Sheen do it in Navy Seals, I just wish more action films would catch on and quit with the weak scripts.
Remember that scene in Snatch when Mickey O'Neil threw that first punch and knocked that huge guy out? Something similar happened in The Bourne identity when Bourne is sleeping on a bench in a snow-covered park and two police officers come to tell him to move along, and he ends up beating them both to the ground before he even really realizes what he's doing. This is what makes the movie fun. Sure, it's not the most intellectually involved screenplay, and it's even been done before in almost exactly the same form, but it's fun to go along with this character as he discovers all of these skills that he has, especially since he doesn't even know why he has them.

(spoilers) There are times during the film when there are so many possible identities that may each be the real one (if there IS a real one) that it gets confusing as to which identity he is investigating or which one is thought dead by his enemies. However, whenever this does happen, it only serves to concentrate more attention on the action and the physical aspect of the film, which is clearly its strongest asset. We eventually learn that Jason Bourne is a $30 million government weapon, and if I remember correctly, there was nothing in the film to suggest for certain that Jason was not some sort of cyborg, including that first kiss scene. When Marie put that first peck on his lips, he stood there staring at her for a few moments too long, like he was consulting his memory banks trying to figure out how to react in this sort of situation. Besides, if he were a cyborg, it would explain his bulletproof shoulder blades!
Here's a guy that has survived floating for an unknown period of time unconscious in the ocean (okay, THAT hints that he's not a cyborg), two bullet wounds to the back that would have punctured both lungs and probably his heart if it weren't for the above-mentioned bulletproof shoulder blades, and who can pull all sorts of fight moves that make Neo and Morpheus look like kids, and we are taken along with him as he desperately tries to figure out who he is. It's not exactly clear who the bad guy(s) is or are in this film, which only serves to add to the suspense and fun created within it. It's an interesting and refreshing change to see the kind of character development that we see in this film, where we grow to like and to root for this guy with amnesia only to later learn that he was pretty much the mastermind of the botched assassination attempt. Given that, he can't really be seen as the good guy, but I guess that since he only wants to forget all that and start a new life with Marie we're meant to see him that way.
And speaking of which, this is the first element of the film where it starts to falter. This guy is a trained government assassin, yet he is completely derailed by a couple of kids at the crucial point in his mission. Sure, it would not be a pleasant thing to see an African leader murdered in a film in front of his kids, but you have to wonder where that $30 million went if he is so easily weakened. But if you can look past the questionable female presence in the film (questionable only because no woman on earth would go through all this for a good looking guy) and the obligatory ending (I remember watching the conclusion of all of Bourne's troubles, and just waiting for the impending reunion scene), you will get a quality action film. There are some scenes where the movie knows it's messing up (such as when Bourne amazingly knows EXACLTY where the shotgun is in a house that he has only spent one night in), but it is always sure to correct itself sometime during the film (in this case, in the scene where he explains to Marie that he knows that the best place to find a gun right now is in the cab of the gray pick-up truck out front).
Of course, we can't understand how he could know this, but that's beside the point because we aren't meant to discover a full understanding of who he was before the assassination attempt. The Bourne Identity is not about who Jason Bourne was before he lost his memory, its about who he is as a human being underneath all of the training that he was given by the government and the purpose of which he no longer understands or believes in. He doesn't want to be an assassin, he wants a normal life with Marie. We're just here to see the conflict involved in getting rid of one life and starting the other. These are very different themes for one movie to deal with, which is why it falters at some points, but the action and the acting and sheer fast-paced excitement over-shadow the lesser elements, making The Bourne Identity a very worthy action thriller.