Bad Actors with Amnesia Go Rampaging in Berlin

Rating: 5/10 (12 August 2011)

Woa. I'm worried about the people who think this was a well-scripted, -acted or -directed feature, or who found the action scenes in any way convincing. Wrong! This flick is a DUD! Just about passable for those brain-dead evenings when you can't converse yet aren't ready for sleep, killing time between long-haul flights in airport hotels, or creating mood lighting if all your lamps happen to be broken.
You definitely don't need to think too hard or try to follow the plot or anything like that because there's precious little rhyme or reason to this ridiculous goose chase! So feel free to fall asleep whenever you get bored, rewind or fast forward and watch the film from random points... heck, you can even switch language settings and view it in Dutch. (Or if you are in fact Dutch then try to pick a language you don't know, like Mandarin.) It really doesn't matter and the movie won't make any more or less sense either way. This is a stoopid film that fails spectacularly at trying to build tension in the way of the Bourne Trilogy or about a million other movies that work the "did I just hit my head or am I an elite trained assassin?" genre. But unlike either the Bourne films or Memento, another film that successfully toys with the conundrum of memory and identity, this movie - the title of which I've already deliberately forgotten - never, ever, ever, makes the viewer curious or hungry to solve the riddle.
It's just boring and dumb and despite the stellar-sounding cast, the performances are mostly atrociously stilted. A surprisingly convincing Diane Kruger wipes the floor with the rest of the cast. But before we start polishing statuettes: it's not hard to look like a great actress when you're acting opposite a Liam Neeson who displays all the emotional range of a Thunderbirds puppet in the role of a supposedly distraught hit-target in a foreign land. The scene in the art museum with his "wife" is jaw-droppingly devoid of any believable emotions, even once you take the double-crossing storyline into consideration. When you consider Neeson's recent personal tragedy in real life, regarding the untimely death of his wife, it seems perverse that he chose this role and even stranger that he gave it such a wooden delivery. The truly uninspired script is only partly to blame.
There are so many holes in the lazy excuse for a plot that it's not even worth dignifying it by puzzling over them. But purely for amusement's sake, and just in case you do find yourself at some airport Hilton with 2 hours to murder, here are a couple of questions you might enjoy pondering while half-watching this tripe: who does anyone work for and what are their goals?; how does a guy with no ID or bank card, who's lost all his luggage in a foreign country have limitless and mysterious access to large wads of cash on demand and a mobile phone whenever he needs one?
This film has no suspense, no sexual chemistry, unexciting and over-choreographed car chases, and unintentionally hilarious dialogue: would a high-ranking diplomat's wife really offer a Saudi prince a martini as soon as he entered the room?
It also has weird casting in the supporting roles. I swear the Sheikh is one of the Wayans brothers in a Halloween costume while Frank Langella is more undead than when he played Dracula all those years ago. January Jones is as artificial and unbelievable as her tampon-brand sounding name: a wind-up Barbie doll. Even once you get that she's SUPPOSED to be a soulless automaton, it's still hard to forgive a performance that would have seemed amateurish in a high school play. Meanwhile Sebastian Koch, so excellent in "The Lives of Others", wanders around this set with an anxious look on his face that seems to say 'I hope the cheque clears.' The director is so bad I'm gonna do him a favour and not even mention his name, simultaneously sparing me the effort of going to look it up. Best forgotten.
However, I gave the movie a 5 and not a 0 for this reason: should you be at all interested in a career in film and/or film criticism, this film (oh yeah, I just remembered the title, "Unknown" - how apt) makes an excellent study into that hard-to-define territory of when something just isn't working.
So many times during this movie I found myself thinking stuff like: "why..?.what is it about this chase scene that's so terrible and wrong...plenty of chase scenes are improbable so it's not just that....what is it about this bit of dialogue here that seems so cheezy and fake..?.lots of movie characters say things they wouldn't say in real life..why is it bothering me that we're supposed to buy Diane Kruger being hot for Liam Neeson..? .plenty of grey goats get down with fresh fillies in popular films..."
And on that note, let me conclude thusly:
if you find yourself a-hankerin' for a film about an almost-over-the-hill-but-still-kinda-handsome American guy being rescued from vague dangers and a boring medical conference in a European capital by a sexy girl with a cute accent roughly his daughter's age, with whom he then runs through various underworld and club settings whilst evading the baddies, then I suggest skipping "Unknown" and instead watching Roman Polanski's "Frantic" from 1988, starring Harrison Ford as the Liam Neeson character and Emanuelle Seigneur as Diane Kruger.
To be honest, that's not a very good film either. But it's a whole helluva lot more substantial than this lint.