The Bourne Identity. Directed by Doug Liman. Written by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron based on the novel by Robert Ludlum. With Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen, Brian Cox, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Gabriel Mann, and Julia Stiles. A Universal Pictures release. At the Apple Valley, Entertainment, Flagship, Holiday, Hoyts, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.

Who needs an identity when you're having this much fun? A man (Matt Damon) without a past but with loads of unexplained talent stirs from the abyss of amnesia to snap wrists, wipe out squads of armed Marines with his bare hands, race a tiny Renault through an armada of police cars on the streets of Paris, all in the company of a beautiful woman and with a valise full of cash in various currencies. The inevitable Hamlet-like reveries about who he is evaporate when he snaps into action, becoming the serene center of a world of whirling chaos, doing what he was born to do without a second thought or a moment's hesitation. Directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, Go) with wit, glitz, and density, The Bourne Identity defines the action movie.

And when you're having this much fun, who needs enemies? Well, the late Robert Ludlum, on whose novel this acid spritzer of a spy thriller was based: the book posited a beleaguered and flawed but essentially benign CIA pitted against an elusive network of terrorists for hire. Us against them, and the biggest problem facing the half-dead man found floating and bullet-pocked and with a blurred palimpsest for a memory by fishermen off Marseilles, other than avoiding the strangers who are trying to kill him, is figuring out which side he's on. Nursed back to health by his rescuers, with only a Swiss bank-account number as a clue, he sets off to discover what is true and false, who is good and evil -- in short, his identity.

Liman's adaptation takes Ludlum's premise, dumps the Manichæan world view, and punts. There are no real bad guys, only irritations like exiled African leader Wombosi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), the José Canseco of deposed dictators, who threatens to blow the lid off the CIA's dirty tricks unless the agency reinstates him. Now that he's survived an assassination attempt, he's really pissed. So are Conklin (a reptilian Chris Cooper), head of a CIA operation called Treadstone, and his boss, Abbott (Brian Cox, the anti-Morgan Freeman), a bureaucrat answerable to Congress. Their spy has left them in the cold, and they have to find him before anyone discovers who he is.

Meanwhile, the bank-account number has led our hero to a safe-deposit box containing money and a handgun and an identity. Too many identities, in fact: the box is full of passports from different countries with different names and all with his face. Jason Bourne is the one he chooses, and so reborn he continues on his increasingly ruthless odyssey, enlisting along the way the help of threadbare nomad Marie Kreutz (Franka Potente of Run Lola Run) by offering her $10,000 for a lift to Paris.

Marie suspects the price might be a little cheap after watching Jason drive a ballpoint pen through a would-be assassin's hand, but there is something about this stranger, a magnet for savage violence and a hell of a driver, that compels her. And indeed, Damon's performance is a sneaky one. He's the antithesis of Cary Grant in North by Northwest: his appearance of a callow, unformed youth conceals a suave master of all situations. Neither is Potente Eva Marie Saint: pale, stringy-haired, and terrified, she's harrowed to a core of alluring need and limber strength. Their first physical contact, a tentative touching of lips and noses, is as wrenching as some of Jason's more bone-crunching encounters.

In those scenes and most others, Damon is far more convincing than his sidekick Ben Affleck in the oddly parallel The Sum of All Fears. Whereas Affleck seems desperate to find an on-screen identity, Damon seems to be trying to lose his, taking on this role and that of the lethal chameleon in The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Bourne Identity also paints a more troubling, ambiguous picture of the new world order. Although the CIA (and the KGB, for that matter) in Tom Clancy's Fears may bend the rules and have lapses of lucidity and undermine the values of democracy, it bulwarks against the axis of evil. In Identity, however, the CIA, or whatever shadow system runs the world, is amoral and amorphous, a self-perpetuating labyrinth that is a bulwark only of its own survival.

Which makes the film's resolution -- a training program that is a cross between Universal Soldier and the al-Qaeda? -- neither satisfying nor surprising. That and a resort to endangered children as a plot and motivating device are among this sleek artifice's chief flaws. But Bourne's identity -- or lack thereof -- haunts the memory.

Issue Date: June 14 - 20, 2002