The Bourne Identity

Starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Clive Owen, Chris Cooper, and Brain Cox.

Directed by Doug Liman

Yet another case where you shouldn’t read the book until after you’ve seen the film. This isn’t because the book will ruin the ending of an amazing thriller that you might never have seen coming. In this case, the plot of Robert Ludlum’s best seller is so drastically altered that the two stories bear only a surface resemblance to each other. Matt Damon plays a man plucked from the water in the middle of the Mediteranean, shot twice, and completely without memory of himself or his past. The only clue to his identity is a Swiss Bank account number, surgically implanted under his skin. Here, most of the similarites end. The reason reading the book first is bad in this case is that there, the plot twists were myriad, rivaling The Usual Suspects or The Crying Game (and not just that one, um, big one.) Liman has chosen to replace plot here with style, and not particualrly effectively. The action is acceptable but not top notch, with too many shaky camera angles limiting the balletic action of some of the fight scnes, though not the one in Bourne’s Paris apartment, which was great. The villian is flat and uninteresting, the chase seems obvious at every turn. Franka Potente’s dedication to the hero seems based simply on attraction rather than emotion, Chris Cooper and Brian Cox chase Bourne for no other cause than to save their own asses, and ultimately, Bourne himself discovers little of who he really is, only that it’s not what he wants to be, like some psychotic and violent mid-life crisis gone awry. The only emotional depth added to his character at all is done so by someone else, a secret agent known as the Professor, played with interesting emotional depth in his only speaking scene by Clive Owen, who seems to play only parts where the character has no name (he was The Driver in the BMW films series last year, all of which had more interesting plot twists than this film. They were also under 10 minutes each in length). When all is said and done, this is just another soon to be forgotten summer action flick. 2 cell phones.