The Bourne Identity
Categories: [ TV/Cinema ]
A fishing boat saves a man from the sea. The man has two bullets in his back, a small device under his skin which shows a Swiss bank name and account number and no clue about who he is. After reaching the shore, the man spends the night in a public park where he's awoken in the middle of the night by two policemen. Without even thinking about it, he fights them barehanded and flees. The next morning, he goes to the bank in Zürich and finds in his safe a collection of passports, loads of money in various currencies and a gun. He learns that his name is (probably) Jason Bourne. He leaves the gun and goes to the US embassy, just in time to escape the Swiss police. There he is about the be arrested again but manages to escape, with the help of Marie, a girl who had trouble at the embassy. They go to Paris, where Bourne has an appartment. There, they get attacked by an unknown man crashing through the window, but the man dies before Bourne is able to interrogate him. Before the attack, Bourne manages to find a trace of his past: he has spent time in a hotel under another identity, and he is supposed to be dead. Marie manages to get a list of the phone numbers he called when he resided at the hotel, which gives him a clue about what he did in the past: getting interested in a boat owned by a former African dictator, buying diving equipments… During the night, the ex-dictator is assassinated, and Bourne understands that he had been sent by the CIA to kill him (because the man threatened to expose the CIA actions in Africa if they didn't help him to get back to power) but failed. Bourne and Marie then go the morgue to see the body, but it has been taken away already. They then flee together barely escaping the French police. Marie manages to reach a former boyfriend who lives in the countryside, where they find shelter for one night. The next morning, Bourne notices that someone is watching them and will probably try to kill them. He finds and neutralizes the killer, from whom he learns nothing except the name “Threadstone”. He sends Marie to hide with her friend, then uses the mobile phone of the killer, to contacts whoever had ordered him killed and gives him an appointment in Paris. Bourne doesn't show at the appointment, but uses the event to follow the man (his former boss) to a CIA hideout where he almost got killed again. He however learns that he has been specifically trained to be the perfect invisible killer (the Threadstone project), and his memory comes back to him: he was supposed to kill the ex-dictator and put the blame to one of the man's collaborators, but didn't complete his mission because children were present on the scene. Bourne's boss is then eliminated in a CIA attempt to conceal the failure of the Threadstone project. At the end, Bourne finds Marie again somewhere on the Mediterranean coast.
Loads of car chases, fight scenes, stereotypical camera movements, and a disappointing plot. But I really liked the Richard Chamberlain version TV movie when I was a kid.