FBMR - The Bourne Identity
Film-Buff Movie Reviews


THE BOURNE IDENTITY (2002) ***

This movie almost never stops. The action is pretty quickly paced. The story is a little hard to follow at times, but not completely incoherent. It’s a fairly good action movie.

Matt Damon plays the title character Jason Bourne. He is found floating unconscious in the Mediterranean. When he comes to, he has no memory. He has no idea how he got where he is, who he is, or why hand-to-hand combat and the ability to speak foreign languages are second nature to him. Meanwhile, the CIA, after thinking he’s dead and failed his mission, find that he is alive and try to cover their butts by having him killed. Unfortunately for them, he doesn’t die so easily. And so the game of cat-and-mouse begins. Along the way he enlists the help of Marie (Franka Potente), and the two of them proceed to run to stay alive.

The only characters that truly get developed are Bourne and Marie, and both Damon and Potente deliver very good and very believable performances. The other big name actors (Chris Cooper, Julia Stiles, Brian Cox) are wasted on characters that never really go anywhere. It was unfortunate.

One of the highlights is a great car chase through the streets of Paris that reminded me of RONIN. I don’t know what it is, but I think there is a rule that if you film a car chase in Paris, at one point, the car has to go against traffic … either on a highway or a one-way street.

It’s not as clever as I thought it was going to be, but was still a fun summer action movie.

IMDb - The Bourne Identity