Unknown
by Dante Rosario on February 20th, 2011
The Players: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Aidan Quinn, Bruno Ganz, Frank Langella, and Sebastian Koch.
The Game Plan: Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson), and his wife Elizabeth (January Jones) travel to Germany for a biotechnology summit where he is to present his thesis. The trip takes a sudden and drastic turn when Dr. Harris is in a car accident that leaves him in a coma for four days. When he awakes, he realizes he has no means to identify himself as Dr. Harris. From there we follow Martin as he searches frantically for his wife, and tries to prove to his close friends, colleagues and the authorities that he is the real Dr. Martin Harris. As the plot progresses and Martin slowly pieces together the fragments of his memory, he uncovers a large-scale conspiracy, and realizes that nothing about his former life is what it seems.
Dante’s Thoughts: Unknown is like Taken meets The Bourne Identity, but not quite as good. The reason this film falls short is largely because of the lack luster group of supporting characters who are all predictably eager to help Martin figure out the mystery that has become his life. Not to mention they both came straight out of the pages of the suspense thriller play book. There’s Gina (Diane Kruger) an overly tough female cab driver, and Ernst (Bruno Ganz), an ex German military detective type. The plot devices used to sell Gina and Ernst were just a bit too cliché and forced for me.
At first Gina wants nothing to do with Martin, then all of a sudden she lets him stay at her place, a point I found to be even more unlikely than the conspiracy driving the film. Ernst comes in when one of nurses at the hospital Martin is taken to following his accident passes a note to him. Of course the nurse in question just happened to have been helped by Ernst when she was in trouble.
Despite all its transparency, this movie does manage to keep the audience on their toes until the very end. Unfortunately after all the conspiracy theories and build up, the ending of this film was less thrilling than I’d hoped it would be.
Touchdowns: I enjoyed the fact that there are enough twists in the plot as the movie progresses that allow the audience to formulate theories about how the story will end up, but like all good thrillers the audience truly has to wait until the very end to make sense of everything that was thrown at us. By the end of the film I realized certain things I’d picked up early on, fit very well with the ending, which is what we all want out of a decent suspense story.
The acting is good, but not stellar. What worked was, each of the characters does an acceptable job convincing the audience that they are who they say they are, which really toys with your mind since you already one of the characters is absolutely full of it.
Penalties: Unknown is a somewhat interesting and intriguing film, until you stop to ask yourself; “is this really worth killing for?” To top it off, after all the mayhem, the big reveal at the end was anticlimactic, because the audience is never told who was actually behind it all.
End Of Game Summary: Unknown has all the essentials to make it a good thriller, but still lacks some of the necessary elements that will leave audiences wanting more.
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