Flak Magazine: Review of The Bourne Identity, 6-25-02

Not much goes kaboom in The Bourne Identity, a welcome departure from the usual noisy action flicks of summer. While an entire city is decimated in The Sum of All Fears and countless popgun shootouts pollute Bad Company, a deliberate, chilling silence infuses Bourne with fright more common than nuclear destruction and as primitive as self-preservation. Bourne's tension and strength quietly play on the fear of being found out.

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) awakes from a fitful nap at sea with bullets in his back, an implanted message in his hip and no memory of who he is. He follows the few clues he has to a Swiss deposit box, where he finds several passports all with his picture and different names. The deposit box is also stuffed with money in various currencies and a gun. Bourne gets the idea that he must have been a naughty and dangerous man before he forgot his past. Fearing reprisal, he attempts to hide.

He offers a poor German woman named Marie (Franka Potente) $20,000 to drive him to Paris, where he plans to figure out who might be after him and who he is. The predator on Bourne's heels is the CIA and he is a glitch in the spy agency's assassins program. As Europe's finest police officers and trained killers come to detain or execute Bourne, he falls back on his conditioned reflexes: He is fluent in several languages, advanced in the martial arts and handy with a firearm. Most of his talents, however, help him simply evade and escape.

This is where the silence come into play. As Bourne rummages through a Parisian apartment he lived in back when he remembered his life, you can sense the danger drawing near. His hunters always seem to be on the other side of the door. Whether he is eating at a roadside diner or romancing Marie while they are holed up in a motel, his enemies position for a shot at his head and Bourne stays guarded with his eyes alert and his mouth often shut.

Even when engaged in a game of cat and mouse with a would-be killer, Bourne doesn't resort to chatty bravado. He doesn't shout out to his rival, "I'm a bad mo-fo and I'm about to kill you in a gross, bloody and 'ironic' way because it says so on page 72 of the script!" Instead, Bourne thinks, then acts. What's there to discuss?

In a scene that is as electric as a live wire, Bourne circles one of the men sent to kill him (Clive Owen). The man is laying low in a thick country field. Bourne stands on the edges of the woods overlooking the land. He wants to come closer, but knows his footsteps would be heard and that the man in the field would shoot him dead. So Bourne fires into the air. The noise alarms a flock of birds who fly up, out and over the field. The birds' fluttering wings and scared chirps cover Bourne's movements. The man in the grass tries to ignore the animals and find his target. He looks this way and that and is pierced by a bullet before he knows what's what. Words don't interfere with the scene and words don't do it justice.

Bourne is succinctly superb. Damon and Potente often say enough with their worried, earnest faces. The story unfolds in measured but flowing paces. The action is thrilling without approaching the distasteful. And above all, the hero is identifiable to audiences: An individual trying to cover his ass and leave his past behind him.

— Rasheed Newson (rasheednewson@hotmail.com)