Indie director Doug Liman wanted to make his mark on mainstream Hollywood after Swingers and Go.

Matt Damon wanted to break away from his on-screen duets with best mate Ben Affleck.

So here's the film they both hope will help them succeed - the movie adaptation of Robert Ludlum's Cold War spy novel.

It's already had the small screen treatment, courtesy of a silver-haired Richard Chamberlain in 1988.

At 32, Damon knocks a few years off the titular character and gives him some brawny charm in this edgy but self-consciously modernised update.

Rescued from the Mediterranean by some fishermen with two bullets in his back and a Swiss bank account number embedded in his hip, Damon hasn't a clue who he is.

Working to recover from amnesia, he discovers he has an impressive range of linguistic and martial art skills.

With his only ID, the bank account number, he opens a Zurich safe deposit box, finding a gun, a stash of cash and a multitude of passports - one identifying him as Paris-based American, Jason Bourne.

With a hastily-enrolled sidekick, Marie (Potente), a German wanderer he pays $10,000 for a lift from Zurich to Paris, Bourne heads off to find himself, slow to realise - despite the deposit box clues- that he's a CIA hit man.

We discover that he botched an assassination attempt known in Langley headquarters as operation Treadstone.

Now his bosses, desperate to keep it secret, want their man out of the way.

The chase takes Bourne and Marie from Paris deep into the French countryside, with plenty of atmospheric shots of European spots, as they dodge the killers sent to eliminate them.

Unfortunately the film doesn't really bring us anything new. A techno music score, polished off with a bang up-to-date Moby tune, is supposed to make us think this is new and fresh - but it's not.

The requisite car chase tries to take on the Italian Job at its own game, with the suspects' battered red Mini outstripping the police in a series of nifty manoeuvres - including an escape down a flight of steps.

Despite spouting smatterings of German and French and suddenly developing impressive Jackie Chan-like abilities, Damon's not a highly believable secret agent - although I can't say I've ever met one, so what do I know?

And while Franka Potente (Run Lola Run) smoulders in her first lead Hollywood role, whoever told her to repeat the German swear word 'Scheiss' over and over to prove her Teutonic roots, got it wrong. It's not big, it's not clever; just very, very, irritating.

Still, many faults are down to the novel, not the movie. If you like a good, taut spy story, this will have you in its thrall. And there are more to come - Ludlum wrote two related novels, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, before his death in 2001.

Suzanne Locke