'Bourne Identity' tense action thriller with weak finish

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

THE BOURNE IDENTITY (Rated PG-13 graphic violence, profanity, sexuality) Three Stars (Good) A strong thriller with a weak finish, this adaptation of Robert Ludlum's novel — about an amnesiac who discovers he was a paid killer, even as his old associates try to hunt him down — has strong suspense but ends with whimper instead of a bang. Starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Clive Owen, Chris Cooper. Directed by Doug Liman. Universal Pictures, 119 minutes.

Still, as much suspense as director Doug Liman generates with the script by Tony Gilroy and W. Blake Herron, they can't quite summon the kind of powerhouse climax they're aiming for. This thriller ends with the quiet "spppt" of a silencer — not quite a whimper, but hardly a bang.

The film is a change of pace for Liman, whose previous outings were "Swingers" and "Go." But he knows how to handle himself in this blend of James Bond and Alfred Hitchcock that's been distilled from Ludlum's original.

Matt Damon plays Jason Bourne, a man first discovered floating in the Mediterranean by a fishing vessel. He is nearly dead when hauled aboard, with two bullets in his back and a tiny silver pellet implanted in his hip. The ship's doctor nurses him back to health and the boat eventually leaves him.

But he has one problem: total amnesia. He has no recollection of his name, his past or how he wound up waterlogged and bullet-riddled. His only clue is that pellet the doctor excavated from his hip, which contains the name of a Swiss bank and the number of an anonymous account.

So he heads for Switzerland where at the Swiss bank, he is given a safe-deposit box containing a heap of cash and a stack of passports — all with his picture, all with different names. The most authentic-looking one seems to identify him as Jason Bourne and contains an address in Paris.

Even as he plans how to get to France, however, the police suddenly start following him. When he steps into the American embassy to escape scrutiny, he quickly finds himself the object of attention of every cop in the building. He doesn't know why everyone seems out to get him, but he intends to find out, as he makes an escape with a young German woman named Marie (Franka Potente), to whom he offers a mammoth wad of cash to drive him.

As Bourne goes in search of himself (while trying to figure out who's trying to kill him), he becomes the object of a rabid hunt by a haunted CIA chief back in America. Ted Conklin (Chris Cooper) is the boss and Bourne obviously is his operative, whose disappearance convinces Conklin that Bourne has gone rogue. So he activates a team of undercover killers to dispatch him.

Bourne's search for his own identity leads him to places he'd rather not go. He has been, we come to understand, a ruthlessly efficient assassin, something his post-amnesiac self can't come to terms with.

In reworking Ludlum's 1980 novel, the writers jettison all of the nonsense about Bourne's search for the international terrorist and assassin Carlos the Jackal. Instead they focus on Bourne's efforts to figure out who he is before someone kills him. He is pursued by police and by fellow assassins alike, even as the awful truth yields itself bit by bit from his shattered memory.

Damon captures the sense of a good man awakening from a nightmare, only to discover that it was, in fact, his life.

Potente ("Run Lola Run") wobbles between adventurousness and revulsion, as the footloose young woman who becomes Bourne's partner in solving his mystery — and gets more than she bargained for. Cooper has a wonderfully sallow steeliness as a man with a complexion created by too much time in fluorescent lights. Clive Owen brings a certain dead-eyed menace to an almost wordless role as a paid killer tracking Bourne.

Still, the payoff of this film doesn't really pay off. Watching this movie is like eating a good meal — and then finishing it with a souffle that's fallen. But even if dessert isn't up to snuff, "The Bourne Identity" gets the meat-and-potatoes of the movie just right.

Rated PG-13 graphic violence, profanity, sexuality.