Decidedly different

Rating: 8/10 (19 April 2004)

There have been an awfully lot of movies with spies in them. A few have managed to drop the shiny chrome and perfume glitz of the Bond series to reveal that spies are people.
The Bourne I watched is an anti-spy movie. You watch a man with amnesia (no smooth patter, no cocktails, no grey suit, no suave automobile, not even a coat) wearing a sweater with two bullet holes in the back try to discover what he did to discover those holes.
Jason discovers (with considerable horror) what and who he *was*. Yeah, he's not adverse to using his valuable training ("a 30-million-dollar weapon" his former boss calls him) in self-defense as the film throws him a series of deadly threats.
Throughout we see the human side of Bourne confronting the reality of his cool mechanical warriorhood ... a nightmare he's trying to wake up from. We see the event that changed his life uncovered.
There are some aspects of the Bourne character reacting to a nightmare reality that very much parallel the awakening of Neo in The Matrix. You could watch this movie simply as an action-paced suspense. But Bourne strives to unravel the carefully crafted seduction of the phoney Bond image. Here the suave, professional killer is recognized to be little better than a dehumanized junkyard dog, doing the bidding of its master, a completely amoral and disposable human being serving his master ruthlessly.
Ahhhhh.