Unknown
It’s fitting that this Liam Neeson thriller’s title is “Unknown,” as what IS known to the protagonist and what is a mystery drives the narrative. Do not enter, all ye who demand logic from your movies; this film, like so many produced by Joel Silver (who produces under his Dark Castle shingle) over the years, is more about thrills and plots with a “hook” than it is about cogent storytelling. This is part of the appeal of his films, though, and with “Unknown,” he delivers another riveting pulp yarn.
Neeson stars as Dr. Martin Harris, a botanist in Berlin with his wife, Liz (January Jones), for an agricultural summit. As soon as they arrive at the hotel, Martin realizes his briefcase was left at the airport by mistake. He hails a taxi and is headed back to retrieve it when the cab is in an accident that lands him in a coma for four days. When he awakens he insists on getting back to Liz and the hotel but only to discover that Liz does not remember him and that another man (Aidan Quinn) is calling himself “Martin Harris.” The rest of the film will be devoted to Neeson’s search for the truth.
The film is based on the novel, Out of My Head, by Didier Van Cauwelaert, although you’d be perfectly reasonable to find more of a kinship to films like Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and “North by Northwest” in the screenplay by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell; both of those classic suspense yarns share “Unknown’s” fixation on mistaken identity and political espionage in a foreign country. It says a lot about “Unknown” that the comparisons with those Hitchcock films are meant as much as a compliment to Jaume Collet-Serra’s film as it is a point of reference for those who may not be sure about seeing “Unknown.” My advice? Check “Unknown” out. Rather than following the Hitchcockian standard of mistaken identity in its traditional fashion, “Unknown” makes a clever left turn by making its protagonist the one unsure of who he is. We’ve gotten the medical ground laid for what coming out of a coma means from Harris’s doctor, which adds to the tension of the scenario as it happens for Martin. Even the audience, who has seen the opening and has seen Martin touch down in Berlin with his wife, begins to wonder a little about whether Martin is who he says he is.
I won’t give you that answer; the movie has some interesting ones for its viewer as we watch. I will say that the film is a well acted and crafted thriller; Neeson and the rest of the cast (including Diane Kruger as the taxi driver, with whom he was in the accident, and Bruno Ganz as a German well-versed in getting information) dive head first into this seemingly ridiculous plot and propel it forward with intrigue and energy. Maybe you’ll figure it out earlier than I did. Maybe you’ll find it laughable. But maybe you’ll leave finding it to be as satisfying and gripping a thriller as I did, even if you find yourself questioning its logic after you leave the theatre. That said, who has ever gone to a movie like this, expecting anything other than the most hard to swallow premise?
