The Bourne Identity
I don't have time to review this exhaustively, but want to be as thorough as I can. I'm also working under the assumption that you are interested in "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" as well as this, the first movie in one of the best trilogies ever made. Opinions as to which movie is the best are well within the limits of personal taste; for me, this movie is the second best behind "The Bourne Ultimatum"; however, like the Beethoven symphonies, one of a great set has to be the least.
TBI starts in the middle of the sea; the Mediterranean, we find out soon enough. An Italian fishing boat finds a body left for dead in the middle of the night. The ship's surgeon is skilled and equipped sufficiently to remove some bullets and, in the process, fish out a diode that blinks what appears to be a Swiss bank number. The man, an American (Matt Damon, of course) regains consciousness, realizing that for the time being, he is among friends. He is able to remember how to speak, dress, play chess, read, and other daily skills, but has no idea how he ended up in the Mediterranean, much less shot, wearing a wetsuit, or anything else; he cannot even remember his name. Eventually, the fishermen leave him ashore with a small stipend to get to the Swiss bank, where the man finally learns what his name must have been -- Jason Bourne -- but not much help with who he is, except that he has a ton of cash, a portfolio of fake passports, and a gun. Except for the gun, he takes the treasure on his journey to find out more about Jason Bourne, no longer able to find buddies like the fishermen -- the Swiss police and the American Embassy security are both interested in detaining him, if not worse. His last friend is Maria, who gives him a ride to Paris for $10,000 so he can put together clues from his last known address. Meanwhile, some American federal agency (CIA? FBI? NSA? the issue doesn't press front and center) is trying to fix something that went wrong with Bourne. By "fix", we get the idea that keeping Bourne alive is not a high priority with the feds.
TBI was the only Bourne movie directed by Doug Liman, rather than Paul Greengrass. So we don't have the latter's hand-held camera sequences, and that's good and bad. The hand to hand combat scenes are a little less intense, but easier to watch. The car chase in Paris is top-notch.
My favorite part about TBI, and the other Bourne movies (or this new species of action movies, in general), is the dichotomy between the policy wonks, surrounded by their computer geeks in monitor-loaded command centers capable of generating impossible intelligence (apparently every intersection in Europe is now covered by a remote camera, no matter how remote) and the rubber-hits-the-road robot assassins, each receiving his assignments by way of a video cell-phone that was probably a bit hipper in 2002 than I'm remembering. For me, TBI belongs to Conklin (Chris Cooper), Bourne's trainer and supervisor, and apparently the one with the most to lose now that Jason is making noise all over Europe. He reports to another fine spook, Abbott (Brian Cox), but Conklin just gets me with his short-sleeve dress shirts and ties that make him look like an aluminum-siding salesman. I got the idea Conklin never did grasp the depth of the hole he'd fallen into, especially when he told Abbott "We will burn for this," and Abbott has an expression on his face like Tonto thinking "Whaddya you mean we, Kimosabe?"
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