good set up undercut by awful pay off

Rating: 2/10 (4 November 2012)

Unknown proves the old adage that a film can never be better than its script. And this is a bad script.
A man awakens from a 4-day coma to find an imposter has taken over his life. He sets about finding out why he has been replaced, but the answer is not what he expects.
The film does a good job of building intrigue in the first hour, largely aided by the acting quality of Liam Neeson and the quality character actors he is surrounded by, notably Bruno Ganz as a jaded post-war relic, and Frank Langella who proves the catalyst for the third act.
Despite Langella's acting kudos, it is his arrival that derails any sense of plausibility and cathartic pay off this story might have offered up. Langella, we are led to believe, heads a crack unit of black-ops agents who are so good their very existence has yet to be proved.
With that information now available, we start to backtrack to the beginning of the action and are expected to believe that these crack agents (a) forgot their briefcase at the airport, the one containing all their IDs and money (b) decided to go back and get it without telling his colleague what he was doing (and why not just PHONE the airport and have it sent to the hotel?) (c) had the foresight to have a back-up in place for their male agent, but neglected to have a back-up for the female agent (d) sent an agent to the hospital to kill one of his own in a way that would not raise suspicion i.e. injecting something into his drip - and yet the same assassin kills two hospital employees by breaking their necks, which might raise some suspicion... (e) has another of their top agents put herself in front of a bomb because of some half-cocked notion that her photo will connect her to said bomb...
The incongruities pile up to sink this film faster than Neeson's second taxi. Clearly conceived as a Bourne rip-off, this suffers from the lack of attention to detail that plagues many mercenary commercial movies. All in all, a bit of an insult to the intelligence.