Still, the movie's not bad summer fun, subverting genre clichés wherever the studio execs would allow. It's got the obligatory car chase... but the quarry is a beat-up Mini -- you can't suppress a grin watching the little junker nimbly zip through Parisian streets and alleys. (Speaking of which, the movie makes fantastic use of Paris, much as Ronin did.) After the chase, Damon looks amusingly shocked at his own driving skills, a refreshing change from the usual matter-of-fact way action heroes handle these things.
He may not know who he is, but his esoteric skills surface instinctively. Like evasive driving, or like when he's questioned by a pair of policemen after he falls asleep on a park bench -- at first he's meek and confused, but then one of the cops prods him with a nightstick, and Bourne's hand snaps the stick away, his eyes harden, and within seconds, he's dispatched both cops with swift, precise martial arts moves. All the while, as he mechanically acts, his face shows his bewilderment: Why do I know how to do this?
Damon is tremendously likable, which is sort of a problem when you think about it -- sure, now he wants to be a nice guy, and presumably that's his basic personality, if you assume the amnesia reveals his true nature (which seems to be a defining trait of movie amnesia -- see Regarding Henry, et al.) -- so why did he ever become a lethal "black ops" agent in the first place?
This is just a sample of the many suspensions of disbelief required to enjoy the film. The depiction of the CIA is fairly ridiculous. Midlevel managers autonomously order political assassinations (carried out by interchangeable dark men in dark trenchcoats with code names like Chimp and Professor); a presumably valuable agent in whom much training has been invested goes missing, and their first thought is not to find out what happened, but to kill him -- when Chris Cooper (as the midlevel manager) bellows (politically incorrectly) that Bourne has "gone off the reservation," you wonder what reservation exactly -- it seems like the whole thing is the Wild West. Then there's something about all the CIA assassins having mysterious headaches, which looks like it's going to lead somewhere and then... doesn't.
Cooper does a fine job with a nuance-free character. Franka Potente, as the woman Bourne pays $20,000 to drive him to Paris in her Mini (all he would have had to do with me is flash his smile and maybe hike up his sleeve and flex a bit -- he coulda saved some money), is enjoyable -- she's trying to find herself, in a way, just as much as Bourne is. You get the sense that, except for the part about men with guns skulking around, her life with Bourne isn't that much more chaotic than her life alone. She and Damon make an appealing couple, too. Regrettably underused are Clive Owen (though he does look gorgeous, which is small consolation), Brian Cox (L.I.E.), and Julia Stiles.
Though
it doesn't quite succeed at being a thinking man's action film,
The Bourne Identity aims higher than the usual lowest
common
denominator, which is a pretty decent recommendation for the summer.
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