Grade: B+

Verdict: Matt Damon, Franka Potente and Chris Cooper. Directed by Doug Limon. Rated PG-13 for violence and language. Two hours.

Details: I spy with my little eye a terrific spy thriller.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: “The Bourne Identity,” a fine bit of spy-thriller escapism loosely based on a 1980 best-seller by Robert Ludlum, opens with an unconscious Matt Damon, two bullets in his back, being plucked out of some rough waters off the coast of Marseilles by a fishing boat. It turns out he has no idea who he is — or what a small capsule carrying a Swiss bank-account number was doing implanted in his butt.

However, his body remembers. Making his way to Zurich to check out his only clue, he discovers he's a multilingual martial-arts expert. Which means ... what? The safety-deposit box he finds only confuses things. In it are a handful of passports under different names, a pile of money in various currencies and a gun.

Meanwhile, we learn that Bourne is some kind of CIA operative from an off-the-books mission gone awry. His boss (Chris Cooper, the rigid neighbor from “American Beauty”) now wants him dead. So the chase begins, with Bourne's only help coming from a young German woman named Maria (Franka Potente). She's got a car and a venturesome spirit, but the more they find out about his former self, the less either of them likes it.

The movie has all those welcome spy-movie accoutrements: a train speeding through a snow-covered tunnel, some sinewy cat-and-mouse games in Paris, topped off by an A-plus car chase, even a chilling spy vs. spy confrontation in the French countryside with an agent known as the Professor (“Croupier's” Clive Owen).

That said, the film's greatest asset is how much it's not just another connect-the-dots, spy-on-the-run picture. Director Doug Liman, best known for “Swingers,” not only treats his story with intelligence, but he makes some refreshingly off-beat choices. For one, he casts lovely Julia Stiles as a Paris go-fer for the CIA. In a more conventional movie, she would've played Potente's role.

Damon isn't a typical hero either. His boyishness brings a different slant to the role. One of the movie's more winning aspects is watching Damon watch himself as he discovers all the things he somehow knows how to do (at times, it suggests Tobey Maguire's wonder when he first tries out his powers in “Spider-Man”). In one amusing scene at a diner, within five minutes of being seated, Damon tells Potente that the waitress is left-handed; the guy at the counter may be fat but he knows how to handle himself; and the likeliest place to find a gun, if needed, is in the glove compartment of the truck outside. Not only doesn't he know how he knows these things; he can't imagine why he would know them.

Potente, who first turned critics' heads in the German film, “Run Lola Run,” is becoming an intriguing presence in American movies. She suggests Lili Taylor with a sexier edge, yet she has a grounded kind of beauty that makes her credible. As a bonus, she brings a European quality to her role that somehow seeps into the rest of Liman's film.

She's not precisely what we expect. Neither is Damon. Neither is “The Bourne Identity.”

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution