Well, he's not a secret agent. He's a regular everyday guy, an engineer. So it's different in that respect, though given some things that happen it makes me wonder whether he'd have the training for such things. But the Bourne Identity was based in sheer realistic terms, and there is a science fiction part to this story that asks some intriguing questions.
From slant magazine's review:
"The film is centered around a computer engineer, Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck), who makes a living by stealing other programmers concepts, selling them to mega-corporations and then having his memory of the business transaction erased to protect both himself and his clients. Shortly after the film opens, Jennings becomes involved in a major new project only to find himself waking up three years later with no memory of what he did in that time. With a series of nick-nacs and household items tucked inside an envelope he sent himself from the past, Jennings has to figure out why he can seemingly predict the future and why the safety of the world is now threatened by a project he can't remember having devoted three years of his life developing. It's an intriguing premise: a man has to work backward to recover information that he once knew, uncovering that information by moving step by step into a future that his past self has already seen."
Oh, and RT is giving it a whopping 29% right now.
