Intermission: Ludicrous 'Bourne Identity' still an enjoyable film

"The Bourne Identity"

Directed by: Doug Liman

Starring: Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper

Rated: PG-13

Like John Grisham and Tom Clancy, the late novelist Robert Ludlum was a sure bet not only for his publishing company, but for the movie industry as well. Ludlum's plots, as evidenced in the latest of his works to come to the screen, "The Bourne Identity," are somewhat more far-fetched than Grisham's or Clancy's, but audiences eat this stuff up.

I found the film to be laughably ludicrous, but have to say I enjoyed most of the ride, even though nothing in the film made the slightest bit of sense.

Director Doug Liman, whose last film was the "Pulp Fiction"-inspired "Go," pulls out all the stops and even manages to invent some new angles on the classic car chase, as well as a scene where Matt Damon as Jason Bourne or somebody, it's never really clear rides a dead body off a staircase, kills a guy on the way down and comes out OK when he lands several stories below.

As the movie opens, Damon's character is rescued out of the ocean by a French fishing boat crew, and two bullets are extracted from him. They also find an electronic device with a Swiss bank account number implanted in him.

Bourne, who is suffering from amnesia and has no idea who he is, who he works for or how he ended up shot, goes to the Swiss bank and retrieves the contents of a safe-deposit box. There are several passports with different names but with his picture on each and a tidy sum of cash. With the names and addresses on the passports, he figures he might be able to get a clue as to who he is, so he picks up a girl, Marie played by Franka Potente, the great actress from "Run, Lola, Run" gives her $20,000 to drive him to Paris.

When Bourne arrives in Paris, things start to make more sense.

Apparently he works for a super-secret branch of the super-secret CIA, and he's failed at a mission to perform a super-secret assassination. His superiors don't quite know what happened, but they begin tracking Bourne after he leaves the bank in Zurich and have no problem keeping tabs on him all over Europe.

For some reason they want him dead, and they send out every one of their top assassins. As usually happens in this kind of fill a well-trained assassin with a machine gun is no match for the main character, who is armed with small pistols and a shotgun.

He's also a master of martial arts and a darned tricky driver as well. Amnesia obviously didn't wipe out all of his memories, just the little things like who he is, where he's from and what he does.

Damon somehow manages to do this entire film with a straight face, and he's a decent actor. Potente is an unconventional beauty who has shown great strength in her characters, from Lola to the dope-smuggling stewardess in "Blow," and she, despite the unbelievability of her character, is a joy to watch.

Liman manages to make something fairly entertaining out of a script that's entirely nonsensical. Fans of Ludlum, and I must confess I've never read any of his novels, are probably used to this far-fetched universe where agencies like the CIA have nothing short of magical powers. But in light of recent news, swallowing this kind of rhetoric is a little more difficult.

Despite its sheer stupidity, "The Bourne Identity" does manage to entertain, and I enjoyed it in spite of myself. Then again, I've watched "Plan 9 From Outer Space" more times than I care to admit.

(Jim Wunderle works at Associated Video Producers and is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician.)