Geena Davis is Jason Bourne

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Have you ever felt a sense of deja-vu when watching a movie?  I had a profound sense of deja-vu recently when watching the mid-nineties big-budget mediocre action flick, The Long Kiss Goodnight.

My initial reaction was to search my memory banks to figure out whether I had actually seen it before and had simply forgotten about it.  Entirely possible, since I do watch an awful lot of movies.  But, no that wasn't the reason for my deja-vu.

Let me run through the major plot points of the film and see if you can spot the same sense of the familiar, if indeed the title of this article is not already enough of a hint.

The hero of the film is found washed up on a beach, suffering from amnesia.  A few memories do slowly start to return, but it transpires that these memories are actually false as they relate to a fictitious alter ego, not the true identity of the lead character.

They surprise themselves when they unexpectedly display some rather unusual and violent skills, which clearly hint at some level of specialist training.  They subsequently discover that the reason for this is that they were formerly a trained assassin working for a black-ops group within the CIA, and that the amnesia they are experiencing is the result of a botched assassination attempt.

The CIA's reaction is to try to cover their tracks by eliminating their own covert agent, but said agent is not ready to give up without a fight, and turns the tables back onto the agency.

Any Matt Damon fans out there will of course instantly recognise this as the plot of the Bourne Identity.  Since, the latter was released in 2002, six years after The Long Kiss Goodnight, you might make an incorrect assumption as to who stole the idea.  In fact, the Bourne Idenity is based on the book of the same name, by best-selling crime fiction author Robert Ludlum, way back in 1980.

All you really need to do to transform The Bourne Identity into The Long Kiss Goodnight is to replace Franka Potente as the sidekick with Samuel L Jackson (who fulfills his usual contractual obligation to use as many four letter words as the MPAA will let him get away with) and replace 'Treadstone' as the black-ops code-name with the slighly less sinister sounding 'Chapter'.  And lastly throw in a few cheap one-liners, and some fireball explosions for our heroes to outrun.

I know that it's often said that there's nothing original in Hollywood any longer, but the similarities here are uncanny.  One particularly strange coincidence is that in both films, the man responsible for training the amnesiac agent is portrayed by Brian Cox (who in fact also plays the same role a third time, in X-Men 2, making this possibly one of the most bizarre niche roles ever).

Does this mean that Hollywood has completely exhausted any kind of originality?  Probably, although some might argue that that happened decades earlier. Perhaps it's an unintended homage, though it seems more likely to just be a glaring example of plagiarism.  Whichever is true though, I actually enjoyed The Long Kiss Goodnight.  Despite it's cheap one-liners and laughable stunts, it's still kind of fun, and is infinitely preferable to the most recent installment in the Bourne series - the yawn-fest that was The Bourne Legacy, which should not even be considered worthy to be included in such a great franchise.

I'd love to see Matt Damon make a return to the Bourne franchise, but if that never happens then perhaps even Geena Davis might actually be capable of a more entertaining sequel than Jeremy Renner was.