The Bourne Identity
                               
The Bourne Identity (1988) - 6.0



After Richard Chamberlain recently passed away, a gay friend said, "We always knew no man that good looking could be straight".  Perhaps, but for his career it was a two-edged sword. His looks certainly helped him in the business but it also limited him to a certain type of role. Heroic. Beginning with his long run as the clean-cut moralistic Dr. Kildare on TV and roles in the Musketeer films, as Alan Quatermain, The Thorn Birds, Shogun, Centennial, Edmond Dantes, Raoul Wallenberg and Jason Bourne, Chamberlain was stuck playing the good guy, the adventurer, the classy fellow, urbane, intelligent. Not that this made for a bad career - it was a very successful one but not one that stretched his acting skills. Chamberlian rarely challenges the viewer, but he is always an easy comfortable watch in the right sort of vehicle and he was perhaps smart enough to realize that.



He was the first Jason Bourne in this two-part TV movie from 1988. My main hesitancy about watching this is that it might push me towards re-watching the four Matt Damon Bourne films and the one starring Jeremy Renner. I am pretty sure I have already seen them all and remember practically nothing. There are so many films I want to watch that it would be silly to re-watch these again. Right? Well, maybe just the first one. Letterbox told me that I also watched this nine years ago and I didn't remember any of it. Get back to me in another ten years and I will almost certainly have forgotten once again.



This is actually fairly good for a 1980's TV movie. Based of course on the Ludlum book which I read in the Stone Age and quite liked. There can't be many people on this planet who have not seen or read it. So, no point in regurgitating much of it - except Bourne was on a secret mission to kill Carlos. Do people still remember Carlos? The greatest assassin of our lifetime though how much was real and how much was myth, nobody knows. Currently, he is residing in a French prison. At 75-years-old, he probably won't be assassinating anyone anytime soon. When this film was made though, Carlos was still out there.



The first hour of this is terrific and then it falls into comfortable TV territory - Bourne kidnaps a woman (the lovely Jaclyn Smith) and after being coldly nasty to her, they fall in love. Don't they always. You have to fill up three hours but all I could think of during their tryst is that you have amnesia, you could be a killer but even more important you could have a wife and four children at home waiting for you and here you are humping this whiny woman. Keep your damn zipper up. Some other familiar faces - Anthony Quayle doing his best French accent, Donald Moffat, Peter Vaughan and my favorite Denholm Elliot as the drunk doctor who mends Bourne - "If I only killed one patient while drunk it would have been ok, but two seemed like a trend".


The Bourne Identity (2002) - 7.0



Oh hell. Of course, I had to watch this version after watching the 1988 TV movie. I really didn't want to, but curiosity won out. I couldn't remember how different the two films were. Well pretty much completely. The TV film sticks to the book, this one takes it as a launching pad into a generic action film - a good one but it drops the entire Carlos thread from the book and instead it is his own government group called Threadstone that is trying to kill him. That never really makes much sense to me. The premise remains the same though. Bourne loses his memory during a mission - has enough to follow a line to Zurich to get a pile of money. The best scene in the TV film is when Bourne leaves the bank and one of the bank employees takes out a silencer and tries to kill him in the crowded lobby of the bank.  Way back when, I was a teller and I know exactly how he felt.



This one shifts that scene to the American Embassy where he has to be super cool to escape. Too cool really. For a guy who doesn't know who he is, would he be that cool? Instead of Jaclyn Smith, he teams up with Franka "Run Lola Run" Potente - not by kidnapping her though but simply by paying her. That among other things is the difference between 1988 and 2002. You don't kidnap women and force them to do what you want by 2002. Chamberlain's Bourne was a bit of a shit, Damon's was Mr. Sensitive. This made Damon a big star, but I actually preferred Chamberlain - Damon looks like he just graduated from high school - Chamberlain has the look of a secret spy. This runs for two-hours while the TV film came in at three-hours and if it had cut out an hour, it would have been much better. Lots more action in the second Bourne. Too much Jacklyn Smith; this one too little Potente. In either case, the woman falls in love - a man on the run from killers must be irresistible to women. Now I have to stop myself from watching the sequels. Will power.