Movie Reviews from Hell
The Bourne Identity
| Director: | Doug Liman |
|---|---|
| Year: | 2002 |
| Rating: |
 |
I have been waiting a long time for a well crafted action movie like The Bourne Identity.
Directed by Doug Liman, it is a skillful and exciting rendition of life as a highly trained CIA assassin, when everything goes wrong, and your own guys are out to get you.
After a failed assasination attempt by Bourne (Matt Damon), he is picked up by a Fisher boat off the coast of France (near Marseilles), found floating in the water with two bullet wounds and a number to Swiss bank account embedded in his body. He doesn't know who he is, where he came from, or why he was there.
After being dropped off and taking a train to Switzerland, Bourne heads to the Swiss bank to try and find out who he is. He finds enough cash to retire on in an assortment of worldwide currencies, a weapon and about 6 passports of different nationalities.
From there on things just go uphill in a wild, fast paced but very crafty action plot. Bourne is taken from Switzerland to Paris for $10,000 in a Austin Mini with a good looking woman named Marie (Franka Potente) he met at the embassy in Switzerland, desperate to get to the bottom of all of this.
There is some seriously cool martial arts, quick, fast, deadly, precise - the kind that makes you wish you could do that. That's the kind of martial arts I like to see on screen. There's been too many comic, or highly overdone renditions of hand to hand combat lately (e.g. The One), and this was a nice relief to see. It's real, it's possible, and it's a $30 million dollar killing machine making it happen. The beautiful part, is it looks like a $30 million dollar killing machine is making it happen. Camera work was excellent and blade precise in all of the combat scenes.
Then there's the chase scene, quite exciting, especially considering the getaway vehicle is yes, you guessed it, an Austin Mini. They are alot more agile than I had ever imagined. In fact, they can drive down stairs! If you've ever been to Paris, seeing a mini cooper going 50kph down a sidewalk honestly wouldn't surprise me very much, people there are nuts on the road.. but there was alot of excitement in the scene, because Paris is quite a bit different from the streets of Detroit, Chicago or New York. Alleys are thinner, roads are cobblestone in alot of places, there's alot of little cars and motorcycles zooming around, and it's hard to know where you're going half the time with all the one way streets. You'll love the chase scene.
It was one of the few movies that I've seen lately that didn't have 'that one part' that made me cringe, or double-check my interest in the story, or just generally screw it up for me. There's some pretty tense moments and the combat scenes are deadly.
You'll love this movie if you want to see some elite ass kicking.