'Unknown'
RATING **
In Unknown, a generic conspiracy thriller from director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, House of Wax), the protagonist, played by Liam Neeson, emerges from a four-day coma to find himself in the midst of a kind of reverse-identity crisis: He’s fairly certain who he is, but everyone else around him seems to have forgotten, as if they’ve contracted a kind of collective amnesia. The filmmakers hope dearly that this amnesia will extend to the audience, that you won’t remember the Bourne trilogy, The Fugitive, or any number of other thrillers from which Unknown borrows heavily. Its main strategy for achieving this is to churn out action-thriller clichés at such a breathless pace that you won’t pause to ponder the film’s unoriginality.
Moments after arriving in Berlin for a biotech conference, world-class botanist Martin Harris (Neeson) nearly dies in a traffic accident. Stranded in a foreign country without any form of identification, he angrily asserts to everyone he encounters he is “Martin Harris, Doctor Martin Harris,” to which he mainly receives puzzled looks from confused Teutons. Events take a more sinister turn when even his wife, Elizabeth (Mad Men’s January Jones)*, claims not to recognize him, and another man purporting to be Martin Harris takes his place by her side.
Is this all some elaborate ruse, or just the after-effects of the car accident? As Martin (Neeson’s version) probes the mystery of his lost identity, he becomes enveloped in a grand conspiracy involving agribusiness conglomerates, Arab sheiks, a beautiful Bosnian immigrant (Diane Kruger), a sickly ex-Stasi member (Bruno Ganz), and a pair of stereotypically menacing German hitmen. The film’s setup is intriguing, and its plot features a few clever twists, but for the most part it's a predictable affair, and one which gradually loses its grip on reality. As a piece of mindless entertainment, Unknown has its moments – there are a handful of well-choreographed action sequences, including the obligatory urban car chase – just don’t try to engage it on a logical level, or you might end up in a coma yourself.
*I thought for sure Jones' character would at some point be revealed as an android, but alas I was wrong.
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