As far as studio actioners go, Unknown has its share of well-crafted set-pieces and steely suspense, but well-versed viewers of modern thrillers won’t help but feel an almost immediate sense of déjà vu.
The most obvious reference point is Taken, whose star, Liam Neeson, Unknown shares, and whose color palette of dark blues and antiseptic off-whites are mimicked here by director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan). Even the narratives are similar; instead of a bad-ass in search of his daughter, Neeson’s Dr. Martin Harris is a bad-ass in search of his identity.
Arriving in Berlin for a biotech conference, with his lovely wife (January Jones) in tow, Harris conspicuously leaves his briefcase, full of important scientific documents, on an airport baggage cart. He hops in a taxi and speeds back to get it, only to find the cab plummeting off a bridge after a series of traffic “accidents” propel it off the road.
Harris wakes up in a hospital four days later, only to find that another man (Aidan Quinn) has assumed his identity, his life and his wife, who seems all too happy playing along. He is the invisible man, the wrong man and the unknown man, alone in a foreign country without identification. Danger darkens every corner, and Martin spends as much time beating off stalking baddies with uncharacteristic skill as he does decoding the mystery of his identity theft.
The more Unknown plunges into a netherworld of spies, espionage and assassination plots, the more it wears its myriad influences on its overlong sleeves. Echoes of countless mistaken-identity and wrong-man thrillers from North by Northwest to A History of Violence to The Ghost Writer to Salt inform, if not completely subsume, Unknown’s serpentine plot. At one point, you half-expect a helpless Harris to be strapped to a dentist’s chair, waiting for Laurence Olivier to ask him if it’s safe.
Unknown has some tricks up its sleeve, but they’re tricks we’ve seen performed before, by better directors. The film’s familiar mechanics unconsciously tell us that Harris’ problem is part of a more elaborate, conspiratorial plot, so when said plot is revealed, the sense of surprise is nil. Inconceivable paranoia is the new expectation.
And Unknown takes a long, long time to complete its predictably labyrinthine narrative, stuffing itself with an obligatory love story between Harris and his taxi driver (Diane Kruger), a Bosnian refugee working illegally in Germany. The film’s 113 minutes begin to feel like a never-ending epic, what with all the false climaxes written into the film’s supposedly thrill-a-minute final act. And, as is often the case with films of this type, the dot-connected conclusion is never as exciting as the existential premise.
But the movie’s biggest disappointment is that it could have been a politically aware, big-business-attacking thriller along the lines of Michael Clayton, already one of the film’s many points of reference. Some of the drama of Unknown involves an Arabian prince targeted by extremists for his “progressive” energy policies and a scientist who is developing a groundbreaking strain of corn that will render avaricious agribusinesses obsolete.
To say that such information is delivered in passing is an overstatement. It’s barely there at all, and it should have formed the movie’s intellectual backbone. Instead, the film’s creative team has crafted a benignly apolitical thriller that decides, in its final few minutes, to be About Something.
UNKNOWN. Director: Jaume Collet-Serra; Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Aidan Quinn, Bruno Ganz, Frank Langella; Distributor: Warner Bros.; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday, most area theaters