Whereas
the CIA is supposed to have abandoned assassination as a tool
of statecraft in the late 1970s, George W. Bush and his cohorts
keep railing about toppling Saddam Hussein and hoping that
Osama bin Laden is dead somewhere. What excellent timing for
the cinematic release of The Bourne Identity,
a story about an "invisible" CIA operative assigned
to kill an African head of state named Wombosi (played by
Adewale Akinnuove-Agabaje) who threatens to expose the CIA's
misconduct! When the film begins, an Italian fishing boat
sixty miles south of Marseilles picks up a young man floating
in the sea, nearly dead, during stormy weather. In an effort
to save his life, one of the crew removes two bullets from
his back and an implant of some sort from his hip. When the
young man (played by Matt Damon) regains consciousness, he
cannot recall who he is, but he is quite a killing machine,
using the form of Filipino martial arts known as Kali. After
being put ashore, the amnesiac takes a train to Zürich,
where the implant directs him to a bank account. He learns
from the safe deposit box in the bank that he has several
passports with as many names but lives in Paris under the
name Jason Bourne. The box contains a lot of cash as well
as a gun. He uses the gun to shoot his way out of the bank,
and then pays a hefty five-digit sum to a drifter, Marie Kreutz
(played by Franka Potente), to drive him to Paris. Bourne
tells her that he does not know exactly who he is but is eager
to find out with her help. Nervous that unknown assailants
are pursuing him, he leads police in her Austin Mini all over
the streets of Paris, and then hides out with her in a hotel
for the night, but the inevitable sex scene is only implied.
Meanwhile, Bourne's immediate CIA boss Ted Conklin (played
by Chris Cooper) assigns the assassination of the African
to another operative (played by Clive Owen), pretends that
Bourne has done so in Paris to make up for his mistake, and
next puts a hit out on Bourne. Thus, Bourne is a fugitive
from both the Paris police and the CIA. With the aid of Marie,
Bourne traces his steps backward through a hotel receipt.
Since he realizes that she is in danger, Bourne tries to take
Marie to safety at the home of one of her friends in one of
the provinces. Conklin uses the resources of the CIA to stake
out all her previous residences and sends the second assassin
to kill Bourne when the duo shows up at one of the likely
houses. Bourne, however, foils the plot, kills the assassin,
and goes back to Paris to confront those in the CIA who have
ordered his assassination after telling Marie to go to somewhere
completely off the beaten path. Bourne locates Conklin to
find out the truth, killing whomever he needs to escape, but
the CIA superboss Ward Abbott (played by Brian Cox) in turn
kills Conklin to wipe out any memory trace of the events.
In the final scene of The Bourne Identity, directed
by Doug Liman and based loosely on the 1980 novel by Robert
Ludlum, Bourne locates Marie for a predictable happy ending
in Santorini on the Aegean, thus providing yet another cinematic
postcard of Europe. MH
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want to comment on this film
