As I remember the book, from the days when I read Ludlum, it did not make a lot of sense. The plot of this two-hour feature has been considerably simplified, and I wish I could say that it made more sense. But …

Plot: guy is picked out of the Med by a fishing boat. He has two bullet holes in his back. He doesn’t remember who he is, but has a lot of special competences that make sense only in somebody who’s a trained assassin. And suddenly his former colleagues — a black CIA op — assuming he’s deliberately gone rogue are out to kill him. As he escapes, he picks up a chick who drives him here and there until, finally, he remembers who he is, wipes out his former colleagues, and ultimately retires to the south of France with said chick to sell or rent motorcycles.

This is a tremendous simplification. As I remember the original story, the Treadstone operation actually consisted of good guys (including Conklin, who here gets a nifty comeuppance) who, in the end, backed off rather than being destroyed. “Jason Bourne” was not a real person; the character played here by Matt Damon was really David Webb, pretending to be the constructed identity of “Jason Bourne” to draw Carlos the Jackal, world’s foremost terrorist and assassin, out of hiding. Marie, Bourne’s companion in the film, was not a “gypsy” (word here used metaphorically for young European person with no fixed abode or means of support) but a Canadian economics professor in Zurich for an international conference. Ultimately, David and Marie withdrew from the world of black ops to teach history and economics respectively at a university in New England.

Well, I guess you couldn’t have fitted the 600+ pages of that into a two-hour film, the more so since “Carlos the Jackal” ultimately turned out to be pretty small potatoes; the “any resemblance is purely coincidental” clause certainly applied to him.

If memory serves, this was done better and considerably more faithfully with Richard Chamberlain some twenty years ago. Well, then it was a TV miniseries, and they had about twice as much time to play with. This film seems to have been more a vehicle for Matt Damon. As such, it’s fairly successful. As an adaptation of Ludlum’s story, I found it pretty lame.

You are an idiot, you couldn’t find your ass with both hands!!! It is not that hard to understand, sometimes I cannot believe the stupidity of people who write reviews.

The preceding honest, if singularly uninformative and useless, comment almost got deleted with about a billion spam comments about Tramadol, Phentermine, Texas Hold-em and the like. Anybody else who has posted a comment that has disappeared should be advised that it was probably mistakenly deleted along with the daily harvest of such spam comments.