Enjoyable near-remake of Mirage

Rating: 6/10 (5 May 2020)

The three archetypal amnesia thrillers are Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), Dmytryk's Mirage (1965), and Limon's The Bourne Identity (2002). Of these, Spellbound is of course the best (because Hitchcock), but Mirage is my favorite. This move is fairly obviously a reimagining of Mirage, so much so that I was surprised not to see it credited.
The movie works well and is very watchable, though just a hair worse in every way than the earlier movie. For example, Liam Neeson and Diane Kruger are great as the two main characters, but Gregory Peck and Diane Baker were better. Bruno Ganz is wonderful Ernst Jürgen, but the private detective role was played by the inimitable Walter Matthau in the original. And baddie Olivier Schneider in this movie is practically forgettable, while Jack Weston, usually a comic actor, was full of screen-grabbing menace whenever he appeared in Mirage.
If you haven't seen Mirage, see that one first or instead, unless modern effects are more important to you than first-rate directing, screenwriting, and acting. If you *have* seen Mirage, and enjoyed it, then you'll like this one too. The plot is just enough different that it won't be *completely* predictable.