The Bourne Identity - Film Review

Matt Damon Stars in the First of the Jason Bourne Movies

Sep 19, 2009

Doug Liman directs The Bourne Identity and turns Matt Damon into an action hero with this entertaining spy thriller.

Russian sailors find a man floating face down in the sea. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) has no memory of how he ended up there. Nor does he know why he has been shot in the back. What he can remember is how to speak Russian fluently, or how to escape from tricky confrontations by beating up everybody in the room, often by using the simplest of objects. When Bourne turns up alive in Zurich he quickly becomes aware that he is being targeted for assassination.

Bourne persuades Marie (Lola Rennt star Franka Potente) to give him a lift to Paris, but there are a trio of highly-skilled hitmen gunning for them, including one less-than subtle assassin who swings through a Parisian apartment window holding a machine gun. Far deadlier and a bit more sensible, is The Professor (Clive Owen) who stays in the background and shadows Bourne till they have a thrilling confrontation in the French countryside.

While the action films of the noughties have tended to focus on CGI and special effects The Bourne Identity is pleasingly old-fashioned. It harks back to the 70’s and films like Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinneman 1973) or the taut, muscular direction of John Frankenheimer. As with the Bond movie, there are a variety of globe-trotting locations, though Bourne wastes no time on charm or pithy quips, preferring instead to keep his head down, to dodge and move, to get to the next point in his journey.

Director Doug Liman made his name with the low-budget indie movies Swingers (1997) and Go (1999). The Bourne Identity was his first big-budget movie, though he has since gone on to direct the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie Mr and Mrs Smith (2005) and Jumper (2007). However despite its success, The Bourne Identity was held back by the studio for over a year by nervous executives worried about the quality of the film and about Matt Damon’s ability to carry an action movie.

The Bourne Identity is streets ahead of any other action movie around at the time, easily outclassing any of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies and performing a brutal punch to the throat to Damon’s buddy Ben Affleck’s The Sum of all Fears (2002). Damon proves himself to be more than capable in the action department and brings considerable subtlety and depth to his performance as Bourne. An even better sequel, The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass 2004), was released a couple of years later.

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