Unknown falls flat from lack of depth

Rating: 1/10 (17 February 2011)

The first ten minutes of Unknown start as any good thriller should -- the protagonist with beautiful wife seemingly happy and about to enjoy a work vacation in Berlin. But everything starts falling apart very quickly, with the film disintegrating into a poorly-mapped, messy and unexplained movie that struggles to even give us a shred of substance as to why we should care what happens to Neeson. Massive plot elements are explained away with one facile line of dialogue after another -- it's as if the screenwriter was trying to pump this one out so fast he would forget what he had already written. In fact, the entire premise of this film is so loosely put together that it's hard to take seriously at all. If Neeson had just stuck to being avenger, and not detective, this might have been gone a bit better.