Do you have ID?

Rating: Null/10 (22 March 2013)

"At the root of Bond is something neo-fascistic and totally materialist." - John Le Carre
The Bourne franchise stars Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, a kind of anti-James Bond who, though a secret agent trained by the CIA, finds himself turning his back on his murderous past and waging a clandestine war against Treadstone, a Black-Ops arm of the US military.
As action movies go, "The Bourne Identity" is stronger than most. The best of its franchise, "Identity" features a number of low-key and inventive action sequences, most of which involve our hero using brains rather than brawn. Bourne's quick thinking, unpredictable and stays several steps ahead of his pursuers, the opposite of Bond, who's always playing catch up.
The film's sequels, "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum", merely rehash the franchise's first film, emulating its "running man" plot and attempting to mimic its action sequences, blow for blow. What was once fresh quickly becomes stale, and Bourne's "ingenious" battle tactics now rarely surprise.
Still, both films contain a number of subplots which aren't usually found in Western action movies. Here Bourne, once a state sanctioned assassin, tracks down the victims of his past and attempts to atone for his sins. Elsewhere he colludes with whistle-blowers and left-wing newspapers (The Guardian, itself slowly dying in real life), attempting to expose a CIA which routinely engages in off-the-grid criminal activities (in real life, they'd brazenly assassinate the leaders of, or engender coups in, Congo, Morocco, Jamaica, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Mozambique, Guyana etc). This is a far cry from James Bond ("Goldfinger", we recall, opens with Bond blowing up the oil supplies of Latin American revolutionaries). Bond's the Imperialist's, misogynistic foot-soldier, Bourne's a disillusioned grunt in an age of Bradley Manning, Jullian Assange and John Kiriakou, which of course makes him a threat. As journalist Kevin Gosztola observed, "To this day, the only CIA officer to go to jail for torture is now officially an officer who blew the lid on torture and who never tortured anybody."
Bourne is himself both whistle-blower and action hero. A John Rambo for liberals, his journey is one from forgetfulness and a kind of cultural amnesia, to direct confrontation. He attempts to expose and remember, whilst the CIA attempts to cover up and silence. This aligns the franchise with 1970s political conspiracy thrillers; the State is the enemy, and Bourne's a loaded weapon aimed at his own former employer. Indeed, when pitted against foreign agents, Bond repeatedly says "my argument is not with you". Unlike Bond, a relic of the Cold War, Bourne's decidedly post-Cold War.
Bond's always had a very rigid sense of self-identity ("The name's Bond. James Bond."). Bourne, though, doesn't remember his name, his past, his identity, and carries a satchel full of passports with faces he doesn't recognise. The locales our globe-trotting hero visits are similarly blurred and indistinguishable; everywhere looks the same. Bourne's both representative of a culture that doesn't really know what it stands for, and one which can't morally reconcile its post and pre amnesic identities.
Whilst a "liberal action film" is some kind of contradiction (the inevitable glorification and aesthetizisation of violence etc), the Bourne franchise nevertheless does atypical things. Women are consistently the film's moral guardians, Bourne symbolically turns books and pens into action weapons, the series goes out of its way to portray water boarding as an abhorrent act which leads to utter dehumanisation (water and water-boarding, continual motifs in the franchise, led to the very creation of Bourne) and Bourne himself is explicitly obsessed with "what represents me?" (and by extension, America). While Bond's your typical spy hero designed to bolster faith in crown, country and offshore escapades, the Bourne franchise ultimately deals with Bourne accepting the responsibility for his own moral corruption; he chose to be Jason Bourne. He is culpable.
No surprise then that Doug Liman, who directed "Identity", has a father who was chief counsel for the senate in the Iran-Contra Affair. And Paul Greengrass, director of "Supremacy" and "Ultimatum", is himself a left-leaning Cambridge graduate and political documentary filmmaker.
The most interesting of the franchise, "The Bourne Legacy" was released in 2012. It starred Jeremy Renner as Aaron Cross, another Black-Ops CIA agent. The film again rehashes the Bourne formula – Cross is pursued by the CIA, who again want him silenced – but also does a number of interesting, new things. It's explicitly concerned, for example, with issues of collusion and participation. How can organisms like Bourne and Bond exist, if not for the complicity of whole swathes of society? In "Legacy's" case, Cross maps a network of globe-spanning factory workers, scientists, politicians, engineers, all of whom contribute to the workings of an illegal CIA project. Fascism, then, depends on a complex mix of unconscious complicity, ignorance, compartmentalisation, collusion, separation, disavowal and outright secrecy. When the CIA project – Operation Outcome – is exposed, it then quickly evaporates, like shadow exposed to light. Members are hunted down, agents are "suicided", and scientists are reassigned or murdered. Such murders recall countless historical events. Regimes, from Ancient Rome to even 21st century democratic states, tend to squelch intellectuals when fearful of exposure.
As an action movie "Legacy" is weak. A stupid last act and many moments derivative of its predecessors undermine its fairly serious first hour. The film contains sequences involving Predator Drones, now the weapon of choice for the US military when it comes to naked war crimes. Recent legislation essentially makes it "legal" for such drones to assassinate brown and black skinned people. Accidentally killed civilian targets are then ipso-facto reclassified as "terrorists", "insurgents" or, as has happened several times, simply "animals" (dogs or cows). Of course Bourne and Bond are themselves drones. But while Bourne wants escape, Bond's the kind of guy sent to silence him.
7.9/10 - Worth one viewing.