Movie 666

By T. Fotherington Hexagram

The CIA: All-powerful, all knowing Gestapo of the world. A lurking shadow fires a silent bullet in Zimbabwe - an Afghan dictator dies of mysterious causes - smoke rings blown from a cigarette in a Zurich café are noted and decrypted - and the CIA, the eyes of America sees all, knows all.

Amnesiac kungfoo superspy Jason Bourne

Well, we used to think that. Specifically, we had a lot of confidence in American spooks back in 1980 when Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity was published. Since the revelations following last year’s dust-up in New York, we’ve come to know better.

“Jason Bourne” is a blank slate when the film begins. Suffering from the kind of short-term amnesia so useful for movie writers, he’s pulled from the night sea by a suitably rough crew of Italian fishermen. Who is this hunky blond boy? Maybe he’s a wayward angel, as he was in Dogma. Maybe he’s the fast-talking boy genius he played in Good Will Hunting. Oh, wait, no. We come to find out he’s a likeable cross between Our Man Flint and the Spy Kids.

We find this out a lot more quickly than Jason Bourne does. As mentally nimble as he’s supposed to be (Gosh, I can speak French, German and Italian!) his reaction upon finding a personal Swiss bank account full of multiple passports, guns and cash is puzzling. (”Might I be an Amway representative?” his face tells us.)

While struggling to determine just what his former occupation might be (Swiss police tail him across Europe, the CIA tries to shoot him, African dictators and international shipping magnates know him by name - was he, perchance, a Web-page designer?) Mr. Bourne discovers his formidable instinctive kung-fu skills, his fantastic ability with languages and his ice-blooded savoir-faire in just about every dangerous bad-guy filled situation.

Can you blame the man for failing to conclude he works for the CIA? The Jason Bourne of the post 9/11-revelations CIA would be sent to Afghanistan knowing zilch about foreign languages (no one at the agency, apparently, knows Chinese or Arabic or Korean.) They would neglect to give him even a legitimate passport, leading to embarrassing and visible holdups in customs, and if a mustachioed, Ray-ban wearing man in a turban held up an enormous placard stating WE ARE GOING TO STEER A JET INTO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER - NO, REALLY! he would either ignore it, or he’d report it to a superior who would file it behind a potted plant somewhere. And did our agents ever really know Kung-Fu?

This movie might have been, as I said, more plausible in 1980 when we were innocent of the bungling going on among our men in black. What is Hollywood going to do now that the reputation of their favorite action-agency has gone from that of a secret enclave of inscrutable killers to a passel of clowns? The only plot the CIA has been hatching for the last ten years seems to have been to try to parallel the action-star-to-fourth-Stooge career of Jackie Chan. My suggestion is that Hollywood ditch Langley, Virginia and start setting movies in underground bunkers in Tel Aviv. The Mossad, Israel’s secret service, is chockablock with sang-froid agents possessed of lightning kung-fu skills, who speak fluent Arabic and can pass for the natives of a dozen nations. Sure, we know that they’re cold-blooded killers in the service of a regime of questionable morality - that’s why we go to see movies like The Bourne Identity in the first place.

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