Top: The Professor (Clive Owen) is a professional assassin sent to kill Jason Bourne. Below: Maria (Franka Potente) and Bourne (Matt Damon) fall for each other while on the run.

Identity and action
The Bourne Identity


Starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper and Clive Owen. Rated M.

Reviewer :: The Big Irish Git

More than 20 years after Robert Ludlum penned the classic spy thriller with a twist, Universal Pictures digs it up, dusts it off and gives it the big-budget, seat-of-the-pants treatment it deserves.

Yes, it has been brought to life before and, while the Richard Chamberlain/Jaclyn Smith tele-movie of 1988 wasn’t a bad effort, it took the money and technology of 2002 Hollywood to really deliver.

Matt Damon, while probably just a little young for the part, was nonetheless well cast as the undercover CIA agent fished from the Mediterranean after barely surviving a very sensitive, but failed, black-ops assassination of a central African political leader.

After removing two bullets from his back and a strange little laser torch from his thigh, his French-fishermen saviours deliver him back to France two weeks later, to begin piecing the rest of his life together.

Having no recollection of who or – more importantly – what he is, Jason Bourne eventually finds his identity – in fact, several identities – in a Swiss-bank deposit box.

Upon visiting the local US Embassy, Bourne, with the awareness and guile of a master spy, begins to realise he is being watched.

When embassy staff – the kind with little curly wires in their ears – try to detain him, all hell breaks loose and Bourne, without knowing how or why, automatically, calmly and expertly fights his way out of a now locked-down, high-security sovereign American installation.

Buying the loyalty and assistance of a pretty girl with a bit of bottle, Bourne heads for Paris, his next and only clue to who he is, where he comes from, and why he can do the things he does with such ease and confidence.

Although the Embassy scene warms us up for action, to this point The Bourne Identity seems to be taking us down the road to intrigue rather than excitement.

But that’s about to change. Get ready for some of the best fight scenes you’ll see in a long time.

The Bourne Identity is set in Europe and, although it is a Hollywood-moneyed film, it still manages to exude all the atmosphere, feel, tension and credibility of classic European greats from similar stables – The Professional, Ronin or even Frantic, for example.

I rarely notice or remember soundtracks, but this one stood out for me – it was very quiet/subdued or even, for the most part, absent – which made for a very eerie atmosphere that kept my heart in my throat and my backside on the edge of the seat

The Big Irish Git rates this movie 5 shamrocks

You can view more than 100 other movie reviews by The Big Irish Git on his personal web site www.bigirishgit.com