Rating: B
Dir: Doug Liman
Star: Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox
This goes to show that a troubled production is not always a death sentence for a movie. The problems here began shortly before production began, with director and star teaming up to demand the revised script get junked, along with a lot of pre-production work. There were also battles with the studio over pacing, with executives wanting a more action-driven product, and Liman’s fondness for reshoots and rewrites led to the production going $8 million over budget. But it proved a big success, both in cinemas and on home-video, representing perhaps the first down to earth, post-9/11 action film. Liman’s cynicism regarding American foreign policy was perhaps driven by his father, who was the US Senate’s chief counsel during their investigation of Iran–Contra.
It does use the old cinematic trope of amnesia, with Jason Bourne (Damon) fished out of the Mediterranean by a trawler, unable to remember who he is, or where he came from. An inserted chip gets him to a Swiss safe-deposit filled with guns, passports and money, suggesting a covert existence. It also alerts his masters, a CIA black ops program called Treadstone, run by Alexander Conklin (Cooper), that he’s not as dead as they’d like. He half-hijacks, half-bribes conveniently passing German, Marie Kreutz (Potente), to drive him to Paris. However, this puts her on the wanted list, leaving her with no option save throwing her lot in with Jason, as he fends off Conklin’s efforts to tidy up loose ends.
I liked this more now than I did at the time, when I gave it a C rating, and snarkily commented, “Bourne has all his old skills… except, conveniently, any interest in disguising himself, which you’d think might be an early step when every agency murderer in Europe is on your tail. As indeed would getting the hell out of Paris.” I mean, I wasn’t wrong. Perhaps in the modern days of omnipresent surveillance and things like gait analysis, disguise and hiding seem pointless. I did note the impact of Clive Owen’s minor role, and that remains something which deserved better. Julia Stiles also gets surprisingly little to do, though at least she would go on to far bigger things in the franchise.
While Liman was an interesting choice, with no particular track-record of action, it’s handled well, with the car chase through Paris particularly memorable. These sequences do tend to be guilty of the MTV-style editing, which poisoned action movies over the next decade or so, culminating in the infamous Taken 3 fence scene. Here, though, things remain coherent: unlike some films which aped the technique, you’re never lost as to what’s happening. It’s interesting he was hands-off on the sequels, though Liman’s next film was the even bigger budget Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I suspect it’s probably Damon who proved key to the film’s success. His Jason Bourne manages to hit the sweet spot of adrenaline, brain and heart in an unexpected way. It’s not a film in any need of a sequel, yet deserves one.