irst of all, a minor complaint. What's with the name?

I know it's the name of the book the movie is based on, but what's up with it?  I assume that the book author, Robert Ludlum, intended the pun, with "born", and the fact that his main character is basically reborn, since he awakes with no memories? That kept bothering me during the movie, wondering if it was meant to be a clever pun, or the character's name just happened that way.  He has numerous other names on passports, and Jason Bourne is certainly not his real name either; just the one he happens upon first and then sticks with.

Anyway, that digression aside, I arrived about three minutes into the movie, but didn't really miss anything.

The most interesting thing initially was the hugely-fat, narcoleptic man several seats to my left.  He was sitting up, looking like a human barrel with limbs, leaning over the back of the seats in front of him, which were unoccupied, luckily.  A few minutes later he was slumped back, arms and legs sprawled out, snoring away.  And I do mean snoring, a nice steady sawing of logs snore.  He went for about twenty minutes, his volume increasing and decreasing, then snorted awake.  He'd sit forward, lean down on his meaty forearms, and nod off again, or lean back and drift off, as his gurgling breathing when sleeping attested, but he was never able to get a rest as long as that first one again.  

Not surprisingly, when the requisite annoying musical tune cell phone went off near the end of the movie, it was his.  He at least had the decency to not start having a conversation then, though it rang again 30 seconds later.

As for the film, it was pretty good.  Reviews are largely positive, over 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is very high for an action film.

The plot, in a nutshell, minus spoilers, is that a guy is fished out of the sea, bullets in his back, and when he awakes he's got amnesia.  His only clue is a small device implanted under his skin that projects a bank name and account number when clicked.  He doesn't know his name yet, but we'll call him Jason Bourne, just to save time. Bourne sets out for that bank, with some money from the kind fishing boat captain, and soon discovers that he speaks multiple languages, knows how to fight like a champ, and once he reaches the bank, finds that his safety deposit box contains multiple passports, all in different names, and a fortune in money from numerous different countries, as well as a gun.  From there it becomes a semi-suspenseful chase film, with him dodging assassins and police while he tries to investigate who he was, since his memory is not returning.

I've never read the book it was based on, and going by the excerpt you can read on Amazon.com, I never will.  It's super-cheesy and desperately-overly dramatic.  To quote from page eight:

Ludlum! When one exclamation point is never enough!

If you read more of the excerpt, you'll see that in the book the amnesiac spends weeks with a drunken doctor, who engages in absurdly-thought out speculation about him.  The doctor notes his past facial surgery, how well his eyes are colored for contact lenses to color them, how well his face would blend into a crowd, how much he would change in appearance with a hair dye, etc.  You can read it in the excerpt on Amazon, it just goes on and on.  "2x4 exposition" as we used to call it in creative writing classes in college; by which we meant overly obvious exposition, the type that made the reader feel hit by a 2x4.

Eventually in the book, much sooner in the movie (mercifully) the story is on, and without thirty minutes of discussion of the uses of eye color when seeking anonymity when wearing a wig.  Oddly enough in the movie, the guy never does anything to alter his appearance, while the woman he hooks up with gets her hair dyed and cut. 

The movie handles the opening much better; with just a brief period of "who am I" before he's off to find out.

Initially in the movie I was getting sea sick.  Most of the early shots are on the boat, when they first fish Bourne out of the ocean, are very tight close ups, with the camera rolling and sliding around as it simulates the action of the waves.  I could have done without that, personally. Even once they are on dry land, there are a ton of very close up closeups. Character's faces fill the entire screen on a regular basis, and often with the camera moving slowly from one side to the other.  I found it a bit dizzying.

Action

The action is well done in the movie.  Every second of action has about twenty cuts, using multiple different camera angles.  This is done since the people in the scenes can't actually fight, but also to make them seem faster and more intense.  It works, the scenes do feel that way, and are over-edited, but the editing is good.  By that I mean that you can follow the action, when a guy punches and then turns and hits with an elbow it seems linear, and when he follows that with a knee stomp it's a fluid motion, despite being shown with about 20 individual clicks.

I'd rather see two guys who knew what they were doing, filmed from a distance so you could see their actual moves, but at least you could tell who was hitting who and follow the movements logically in Bourne.

The first long fight scene happens after "the girl" has been involved, and she's a nervous witness to things (as women always seem to be in movies).  I was expecting the archetypal "I'll hit him over the head with this blunt object." scene, and was gratified that the usual poorly-aimed frying pan to the cranium didn't occur. The guys fought so quickly and furiously, in close up martial arts style, that she'd have had no chance of whacking the bad guy, even if she'd tried.  None of the usual prolonged choking and nearly falling off a cliff sort of movie fighting, and I liked the semi-realism of the combat.  Of course no real fights are ever like that; they always turn into furious wrestling or holding and hitting contests, but if you're going to have clever fisticuffs and leg kicks and such, the way they were done in Bourne was about as good as it gets.

Overall the stunt work was top notch. There were a couple of silly scenes, but only one that was patently absurd, in the "violating all earthly physics" style, and it's near the end.  It's also unnecessary, so could/should have been rewritten, I thought.

The driving was, as advertised, great.  There is a long and wild chase scene in Paris with the heroes in a Mini, and much of the chase goes against traffic in frighteningly near collisions.  It looked real, not like just a bunch of computer inserted vehicles, was fast, and relatively realistic.

The best part, I thought, was leading up to it.  Bourne and "the girl" are sitting in the car, outside a train station.  He's offering her the chance to get out and away before things go wild, and she's considering it while the cops walk closer and closer.  A great scene with the building tension, and when she elects to put on her seat belt and the pumping music starts, you know it's going to be good.  Or at least you hope it will, and it doesn't disappoint.

There was one blatantly fake scene at the very end, and it wasn't action, but was just a guy talking to some senators sitting at their high desks.  Behind him was supposed to be an empty hall, like the senate floor, but it was obviously a blue screen.  The man's entire head and arms were glowing, like the bluescreen superimposed shots from movies in the 80's, when you could always see the characters flickering around the edges.  Why they had such a poor bit of production on such a simple shot is unknown.  Perhaps they added that scene on at the very end, since it's part of the tacked on happy ending, and skimped on the digital effects?  Some reviews said the opening, with Bourne floating in the sea, was obviously done in a swimming pool, but as I got there a bit late, I can't comment.

Plot

The plot, like in many movies, is best when it's developing.  While he's on the run, escaping from traps, trying to figure things out, it's very good.  You are with him, rooting for him, wondering how he'll find things out.  Plus you, the viewer, don't know everything either, though you know a lot more than Bourne does.  Enough to know how much danger he's in, and dread him doing what he does, as he walks into trap after trap.

Once the plot becomes clearer, and he has a final objective, it gets less interesting.  It's just trained assassin vs. trained assassins then, and being as it's a Hollywood production, who will win is pretty much preordained. Suddenly Bourne can do anything, obtain any electronic gizmo, reach any location, and survive any injury. The action ending has a slight twist that I didn't mind, and it was logical.  It also enabled the final ending which is overly-happy and feels tacked on to remove any hint of ambiguity.  In typical Hollywood style.

One thing that distances this film from the James Bond movie that it is obviously modeled after was the lack of chicks.  There is a "love interest", but only just.  Her relationship seems realistic enough as a relatively normal person thrown into this action, and she learns things as Bourne does.  I preferred that to the catty femme fatale types you get in every Bond film.

Emotions

The emotions and sex were done pretty well.  They didn't do anything more on screen than kiss, and she was never at all scantily-clad, but it was a good scene, and pleasantly erotic, in a low key PG-13 rated way.  It had an erotic feel to it, very unlike the obligatory and inevitable, "Oh James..." leaning back on a bed while kissing and unzipping in a Bond film.

There's nothing sexy about the sex in Bond movies; it's just like another item on the check list.  The women are always in sexy outfits, and serve as eye candy, but when they actually get to the sex it's perfunctory.  In Bourne the woman was the opposite. Never sexy, never scantily-clad (after the unseen sex she's shown waking up in a t-shirt and baggy boxers), but she has real emotions, at least briefly.

The always unintentionally-hilarious CAP Alerts kook contributed the following impartial analysis:

• Sex/Homosexuality (S):
  • adults in underwear, repeatedly
  • gaping face kissing while in underwear stripping, then panning away to clearly imply intercourse
  • cohabitation

Yes, "cohabitation".

The oddest thing was how ordinary the woman was.  She was in decent shape, but never did anything remotely sexy, wore almost no make up, had bad hair, never showed any skin (other than her bra straps in a shot from the neck up), and the only sex in the movie was a bit of kissing. For a movie with such a huge number of extreme close ups, I found it odd that they didn't get some supermodel-looking woman for the part.  She hardly had to act, not that Damon did much more than look grim himself, and I think any half-talented bimbo could have carried the role fine, while providing better eye candy.

I'm not saying they should have done that, I found it refreshing to have a woman who looked real, and not like she'd spent the last 10 minutes touching up her makeup while the hero battled for his life.  But it was odd that they didn't get a prettier one, or do a bit more make up on the woman they did use.  Damon is supposed to be a heartthrob, as far as I can tell.  I asked one woman for her opinion and she was non-committal, but a gay guy I asked said Damon was an 8-8.5.  I'd give the woman, played by Franka Potente, a 5, just by her face, in this film, so given that most every woman in every movie is at least an 8, it was odd to see the love interest for a hunky hero guy looking more waitress than runway model.

Her character was good, though she soon became basically vulnerable baggage during the chase; as "the girl" does in 99% of action films.  At least they didn't have her standing around screaming in fright every other minute.

There's a good scene where Bourne has planned out this extremely-complicated hotel infiltration mission, in order to get the receipt he might have left there previously.  They show the woman walking in with his voice in narration, telling her to count steps, count heads, spot the security, pick a code word, wear a bag over one shoulder or the other as a tip off, etc.  She finds a much easier solution, and that scene and his reaction to it is one of the biggest laughs.

Rating

The film is just PG-13, not R, despite having quite a bit of violence.  None of it was gruesome or especially gory, and there was no bad language or nudity or sex, so I can see that as a realistic rating. It would probably have been an R a couple of decades ago, for the hard-edged violence and body count though.  I would have said it was an R after watching it, and I didn't know the rating going in.

If you want to time your bathroom/snack break, consider the following.  I didn't have a watch, and wouldn't have checked it if I had, but the whole thing is just under two hours, so I'll estimate:

First 15 minutes: C+
Next 75 minutes: (starting at the bank) A
Next 10 minutes: (after the second assassin) B-
Action conclusion: B+
Final ending: C

My rating for the whole thing would be a B, maybe even a B+, depending on which parts I thought about at that moment.  I would recommend it to anyone who didn't absolutely hate action movies.

Spoiler-Filled Bitching

Skip this if you haven't seen it/don't want spoilers!

• What happened to the fire escape in the embassy?  Do they just figure the fifth floor will die if there is a fire?  Why didn't the marines notice his footprints on the snow-covered platform?  Why wasn't anyone looking for him outside the embassy (foreign cops who were after him in the first place, if not marines) after they've searched up to the fifth floor without success?

• Why does he dye the woman's hair and cut it, but do nothing for himself?  Fake moustache?  Mole?  Scar? Wear a hat?  Conveniently-enough, it never mattered.

• There was never any hint of him being a super-agent, just better than the rest/more trained.  Yet in the congressional oversight scene at the end, and the angry revelation scene with his angry boss, they discussed him being a $30m weapon, trained and programmed, etc.  What does his training/programming consist of?  What super skills does he have?  He didn't do anything your average secret agent doesn't do in every other spy movie.  I assume this was something that was a major theme in the book, but didn't really survive in the movie script.

• Why did the second assassin at the farmhouse kill the dog?  It seemed like a friendly dog and the assassin was off like half a mile away; I doubt the dog would have bothered or found him, and in any event it would have run back for breakfast.  The assassin would know that this would probably tip off Bourne.

Why did the assassin pick such a poor visibility spot, and not have a secondary fall back spot?  If he has high ground and superior weaponry, he's safe from attack.  All he needed was to hide outside the fence and shoot them through the kitchen window.

Were both assassins meant to be like Bourne, with the same sort of skills and training?  If so they certainly didn't live up to it very well.

• Why doesn't anyone have more than one gun?  The first assassin has a little knife, but everyone else gets disarmed and that's it.  Just a can of pepper spray on the key chain would have done the trick in a number of situations.  Didn't these guys see Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?  You can never have too many guns/knives.

• Where does he get every sort of electronic toy in about 6 hours after driving back from the country house? He had $30k in cash (wouldn't Francs be more useful in Paris?) but you can't exactly walk into Le Radio Shaque and pick up location transmitters and bugs and things to short out car alarms and security systems.  At least I don't think you can, but then I've never been shopping in Paris.

• The CIA HQ in Paris fills the entire floor in that last building. Why does Bourne need to sneak into the main courtyard and climb up there?  He could just do it on the other side of the building where no one is watching.

• Who the hell thought that last body drop thing in the stairwell was worth including? It's sort of cool, but just so hopelessly unrealistic.  Will we see fire departments dragging fat cadavers out to break the fall of leapers now?  Being as the machine gun guy was running up the stairs recklessly, making no effort to sight up, Bourne could have just waited and laid down and shot him as he came around the last corner, and was visible across the landing.  I thought he was going to shoot him through the floor, as much noise as the guy's footsteps were making, it wouldn't have been hard to track him that way, for a super secret agent guy.

Also the body he kicked so hard to make it fall would have gone across the narrow opening and ran into the other side of the banister, rather than falling perfectly straight down to the bottom, as well as dropping head first and tumbling, since the legs were still on the landing when the upper body was out in the air.

I read the book (ok, when I was 10, and in Hungarian, and it was the last book my beloved grandmother ever bought, so I might be biased about it), and I have to tell you, I enjoyed it more than the movie. Mind you, it might not be worth reading, it is WAY too long for it's own good, but the plot had been drastically changed in the movie, and, to my liking, it has been made a LOT simpler, and more in line with the usual "the-government-is-out-to-
get-us-and-they-are-the-root-of-all-evil" approach. The original plot was smarter, and Bourne had a totally different character, and it was not so full of clichés. Being a non-native English speaker and having read the book in Hungarian anyway I could not judge how bad the writing actually is, I'm just saying the original story was much more enjoyable, and I see no reason why they had to change it.

Otherwise, I was actually expecting something worse, so I liked it.

I have not read the book, but from what I understand the character in it is much older, and it's a lot more cerebral story.  As Hollywood usually does, they made the star younger and sexier, and action'ed it up.  It's been about five months since I saw the movie, and the DVD is now on sale, and I find myself wanting to see it again.  At least for the car chases.

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