How to Counter-Attack Summer's Clones

A paper doll. With every cut, every unfolding revealing a clone of identical proportion, each doll discloses the error of the original, the superficiality of the image. Blending generics and originality, a singular paper doll does the impossible and comes out looking nothing like its proverbial brothers.

Based upon espionage novelist Robert Ludlum's best-selling trilogy, The Bourne Identity appeared doomed from the start. Already adapted into a terrible TV movie in 1988, one would predict a further gluttony, a further cloning of James Bond gizmos and super chicks. But no, it works, it excites. Director Doug Liman does something right.

Similar in scope to his earlier project, Go!, Liman takes an expected story and gives this paper doll a face lift. The trick is in the simplicity of the design: the perfectionist tweaking of the errors of the forerunners, the reliance on storytelling. The idea is old, but the details new. This espionage flick gives us a high-speed car chase in a Mini; quick, collected fight scenes and two actors (Matt Damon and Run Lola Run's Franka Potente) who seem out of place in anything but a Princeton crew meet and a German rave, respectively. Unexpected, needed freshness.

Matt Damon is not an action hero. HeOs a pretty face (and CIA assassin) toting nothing more than a case of amnesia, a bag full of money and uncanny directionless instinct. Random counterpart and chronic drifter Marie Kreutz (Potente) comes along for the ride. Damon is merely hitchhiking a ride to Paris to rediscover his past, to escape his former allies and newfound adversaries. Nothing is for certain, the story unfolds slowly, every move plotted and calculated.

This is a smart suspense film without the arrogance of Bond, without the errors of every single identical espionage movie that has come before. It uses simplicity to draw us into the story and envelops us within the believability of Jason Bourne's world.