BEFORE: Matt Damon carries over from last night's film, but last night he was a regular man with delusions of being a spy, and tonight he's a spy who can't remember his past life. I had my whole spy chain planned out, but a few weeks ago I saw that my cable's Movies on Demand system was offering all three Bourne films for just $1.99 each, and I couldn't pass that up. It seemed like excellent timing, so I nabbed them all and shuffled my schedule around a bit to accommodate them.
THE PLOT: A man is picked up by a fishing boat, bullet-riddled and without memory, then races to elude assassins and recover from amnesia.
AFTER: I probably should have been keeping track all along of which of these films are based on books, because some pretty famous authors have turned up in the chain so far - William Goldman ("Marathon Man"), John Le Carré ("The Tailor of Panama", "The Russia House"), Frederick Forsyth ("The Fourth Protocol"), Michael Crichton ("Rising Sun"), and tonight's film is from the books of Robert Ludlum. All notables, though I'm not big on reading the spy books themselves.
Jason Bourne turns up shot and floating in the Mediterranean Sea, with no memories except for some pretty useful ones - how to disarm an attacker, how to speak several languages, and how to get a woman to drive him across Europe and (eventually) engage in some hot spy sex with him in a hideout. Oh, and how to evade capture by driving down a highway the wrong way, which seems to be very important in the espionage biz.
Marie, the woman who assists Bourne and gets caught up in his life of intrigue, had what I think was a very realistic set of reactions when she realizes that she's in over her head, and that her life is in danger - first she asks questions, then she shuts down, and then she vomits. Perfectly normal reactions when in a state of shock, yet you rarely see something so candid in films.
In fact, the whole film seemed on the realistic side - even the amnesia. People get amnesia, right? So I'm giving high marks for not only showing someone acting like a spy, but also thinking like a spy (or at least how we think a spy thinks...). Bourne describes the way he cases a room, locates the possible exits, and assesses the threat levels of everyone in the room - so even though his memory is gone, we're still able to get inside his head, where the fun spy stuff is.
Bourne has to not only figure out who (and what) he is, he's got to decide if he wants to fight his way out of trouble, or get pulled back into the system. But I have a feeling that even if he succeeds in leaving the life, he's only going to get pulled back in...
Also starring Franka Potente (last seen in "Blow"), Chris Cooper (last seen in "Capote"), Clive Owen (last seen in "Inside Man"), Brian Cox (last seen in "Manhunter"), Julia Stiles (last seen in the remake of "The Omen"), Walton Goggins, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (from "Oz" and "Lost").
RATING: 8 out of 10 fake passports
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