Doug Liman’s rousing thriller gave Matt Damon a blockbuster franchise and audiences a skeptical take on the US government at an opportune time
Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity.Last modified on Tue 14 Jun 2022 07.12 BSTn the early 2000s, the action movie was in mortal danger. The reliable heroes of the 80s and 90s – Sly, Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson – were getting old and out of touch. Director Michael Bay was the new guy on the block, with hits like The Rock and Armageddon that repurposed the slick style of Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer into high-concept outings.
Now five movies and one series into the Bourne experience, the film that started it all has been somewhat forgotten. Critics and awards bodies seem to have decided the second and third films – 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum – are the best of the bunch. In those films, director Paul Greengrass overwhelmed the viewer with his shaky-cam, quick-cutting style, creating action sequences that felt more immediate, even nauseating. But The Bourne Identity is still better.
Liman had been trying to make The Bourne Identity since the success of his first film Swingers, and maybe even longer than that. In a sense, the story was in his blood. Liman’s father was chief counsel in the Iran-Contra hearings and even interrogated Colonel Oliver North; Liman later acknowledged that North was the inspiration for the film’s chief villain Alexander Conklin, who oversees the covert assassinations program known as Operation Treadstone.
In fact, the film’s relationship to the 9/11 attacks provide a fascinating case study of how Hollywood responded to the tragedy. The Bourne Identity was originally set to be released on 7 September 2001, but Liman’s constant battles with the producers over the direction of the film pushed the release to 2002. If it had been released on schedule, it’s easy to imagine it being a failure at the box office.
Of course, Hollywood has a way of absorbing its radical content into a more conservative machine, and the films that inherited the action movie tropes of The Bourne Identity left its politics alone. The Mission: Impossible franchise offers a rousing defense of the status quo; while Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt often finds himself at odds with the US government, he never holds a grudge, and rarely do those films make any reference to real-world issues.
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