A "suspense" movie that gives everything away right from the start

Rating: Null/10 (21 March 2003)

I'm not hard to surprise when it comes to movies. I didn't guess the ending of the SIXTH SENSE, I had no idea who Keyser Soze was, and I didn't predict the twist in PRIMAL FEAR. But with the BOURNE IDENTITY, it was perfectly obvious exactly who Jason Bourne worked for in the first five minutes, and in the first ten minutes it was clear what his job was. I simply can't understand how people could call it suspenseful, much less confusing. Frankly, I don't think Director Doug Liman meant to keep anything about Bourne secret from the audience. And that is stupid, because whatever potential the movie had to generate tension and suspense depended on us being as clueless as Jason Bourne as to who he was.
Compare this movie to THE MATRIX. THE MATRIX is a pretty second-rate movie too, but it's good for its first half, for one reason: we know no more than Neo does. He doesn't know who Morpheus and Trinity are, or what they're up to, and neither do we. The brief glimpse we got of Trinity just deepened the mystery. In THE BOURNE IDENTITY, there is no mystery for us to penetrate; we're just waiting for Bourne to catch up to where we already are, which is simply an exercise in tedium. This is aggravated by the fact that Bourne is pretty slow on the uptake. By the time he got out of the Zurich bank, he should have realized that there were only two possibilities for what he was: intelligence agent and professional criminal. The audience, of course, doesn't even have that much uncertainty, since we are shown Bourne's employers early on.
Very little thought went into this movie. For instance, when Bourne discovers his pile of passports, each with a different identity attached, he should have had no way of determining which one was actually him, since he had no memory. But he just guesses right, miraculously. The Swiss police are shown as being unaware that a U.S. Embassy (not present in Zurich anyway) is sovereign U.S. territory. The Marines guarding the embassy are shown as being unarmed until they get into the arsenal; I've never been to the Swiss embassy, but in Nicaragua the Marines carried their M-16 rifles in the very door of the embassy, and even in the consulates.
The best I can say about Franka Potente is that she managed at times to distract me from the fact that she adds nothing to the story. This movie should have been entirely Bourne's show, and she's there just to provide a love interest and to be a springboard for dialogue, because Liman is too lazy to provide exposition with just Bourne himself. Julia Stiles is window dressing; the director obviously hasn't the foggiest idea what to do with his female actors.
Anyway, THE BOURNE IDENTITY isn't a complete disaster. It gets markedly better in the second half; it's no more credible than before, but at least the stupidities, like Bourne's escape scene, have a payoff in thrills. The acting is good by everybody. Take a note of the small touches: when Agbaje enters the morgue, his nostrils quiver as the smell hits him, and when Stiles hands over the information to the assassin, you can detect her fear of him even though he is on her side. And it has a superior car chase scene. The acting by everybody is good.
Overall, the movie is tolerable, but the premise could have delivered a much better film.
Rating: ** out of ****.
Recommendation: Action fans should catch it on TV.