Every little boy has a secret agent phase. It's the perfect job for the ten year olds and under: it's dangerous and exciting, you meet new people all the tme, they have amazing toys and there is no buzzkill mom to call you out on the violence of your leisure. I would've love Jason Bourne if I was born ten years earlier. Unfortunately for Matt Damon, Doug Liman and Robert Ludlum, I was raised on the 80s action cinema, so their brand of hypermetropic and airbrushed moviemaking leaves me more distressed than entertained (more on that later). THE BOURNE IDENTITY is a spy thriller that was supposed to make spies cool again. Although it gathered enough steam to generate two sequels, it never moved the needle for the genre. There are reasons for that, which we will get into.
Italian fishermen find a body adrift during a storm. That body is alive and belong to a handsome middle-aged man (Matt Damon) * with bullets jammed in his back. The man cannot remember who he is, yet has lightning quick reflexes and advanced combat knowledge. The fisherman drop him in Zürich, where the man follows a clue that the boat's medic found sewn under his skin. His name is Jason Bourne and there are people after him, for some reason. He doesn't know why, but he can sense them using the elite training that was embedded in his brain. Running away from a threat he doesn't understand, he hitches a ride with Marie Kreutz (Frank Potente), a troubled yet innocent bystander that'll get caught in the crossfire of the ongoing illegalness of being Jason Bourne. This has to stop, for her sake, but it's difficult to stop something when you barely remember your own name.
There is a persecution delirium at the center of THE BOURNE IDENTITY. I don't think it was deliberate, but it's a variable that made the movie appealing to masses. It raises sanctimonious feelings to be attacked for being who you are, despite not knowing who you are at all. Living unencumbered by the burden of your mistakes, yet armed with deadly secret agent skills is a fantasy many entertain in secret, I suspect. It was not the original intent of author Robert Ludlum **, who wrote a series about accepting the past and moving on, but that ''blank slate'' secret agent gimmick put forward was what entitled viewers to project themselves unto Jason Bourne and therefore get the movie enough attention to generate two sequels. Seems infantile said like that, but a movie that doesn't appeal to your ''secret garden'' fails to stimulate something visceral in you. So THE BOURNE IDENTITY at least got that going for itself.
Jason Bourne even has his own private girl next door. Still not convinced it's a persecution fantasy?
Because I don't see what else THE BOURNE IDENTITY has. It's a movie filmed in ''shaky cam'', also known as chaos cinema, which has for goal to transmit the sensorial perception of what it is to be Jason Bourne fighting bad guys and running away in intense car chases, rather than transmit visual data. I don't know anybody who actually loves that. I know casual moviegoers who are indifferent to it. I know of semi-competent film lovers who despise it (i.e. me), but I don't know of anybody who ever said: ''Wow, it's so intense, I wish every movie was made like that.'' You know why? Because it never happened. Nobody ever said that. It's a bullshit directing technique that became a fad in Hollywood circles at the turn of the century. Fortunately, it seemed to have died off, yet the Jason Bourne movies are wallowing in it.
THE BOURNE IDENTITY was interesting to me for its keen understanding of what makes the inner self tick, but I couldn't help finding it mindless *** and opportunistic. Would it have known such success if it had been released anytime before 2002, in the midst of the 9/11 attacks and the global paranoia that seized the collective imagination? I have my doubts about that. THE BOURNE IDENTITY surfed the wave of added value of its era, stuck to winning formulas and crafted its small place in the history of spy movies. Can you begrudge a project for wanting to succeed? I can't, but the Jason Bourne movies will survive father time for the wrong reasons: they were made at the right place, in the right time. Still not convinced? More on that tomorrow as I'll review THE BOURNE SUPREMACY.
** Who by the way, was an original thinker but never the most talented wordsmith, to say the least.
*** I know it's considered a quality for an action movie to be mindless, but I beg to differ.