I have already BOURNE this story

Rating: 5/10 (4 April 2011)

Copy cat in the bag catches copy rat in the camera. Bourne has already done all that in Berlin, Moscow, London, Paris, Hong Kong or Shanghai, and a good twenty more touristic destinations. This one is touched by some nostalgia with a special focus on East Berlin. Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, the entering station of East Berlin, a little bit of Unter den Linden, next door, and then the Brandenburg Tor on the East side essentially, the East German TV tower on Alexandra Platz, the Hohenzollern Palace' rebuilt after the fall of the wall, and an ex-Stasi agent, and some survivors of the Cold War, terrorist style from the West. We just miss the Karl Marx Allee and the Vopos (Volkspolizei for the younger generation who never met them) of course. I guess East Berlin is cheaper for film makers than West Berlin. Then the whole thing is wrapped up in some kind of nice pieces of ideological good will. The Stasi commits suicide on the screen. The brutal Serbs are killed one by one and one after another. The Arab prince is a nice-looking nearly Caucasian young chap and he is supporting western science. The scientists are developing a new type of maize that will grow in the desert and will kill all insects five hundred miles around and the NGOs are even said - or is it told? - to approve it, and it is true the ecological zombies have been made scarce. The only negative point is that the terrorists are plain criminal hit men paid by the agricultural industry to kill the scientist and steal his files. And all that goes down the chute because of a weirdo professional killer who loses his memory and his mind. Superb! Well, people my age can always get some kicks out of the little bits of East Berlin they remember when the Stasi was everywhere. But I guess that will do for this plagiaristic European TV elite.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU