Weak in the knees...some great action and suspense, but wobbly wobbly logic

Rating: 6/10 (25 April 2011)

Unknown (2011)
If you don't mind implausibility on a platter, and lots of formula stuff packed into a modern day Berlin thriller, you might just like this movie. It's well made, in physical terms, and the acting is good if nothing distractingly good.
But boy do you have to look the other way time and again as the actors do ridiculous things. Even when the biggie (huge) twist occurs partway through, it doesn't change the unreasonable behavior of many of the leads, both on the good side and the bad. And most of it was avoidable, maybe just a matter of expedience to get to the next creepy moment, or the next fistfight (there are a couple of doozies), or the next car chase (there is an epic pair of those, too).
I like Liam Neeson the way you might like a lonely neighbor for Thanksgiving. He's warm and a gentle guy, sort of big and sort of handsome and totally regular. I don't think he's an amazing actor, for sure, but he holds his own as a seeming biotech research whiz going to an international conference. At first the leading woman in his life is his wife, but that doesn't last long, and the real star as his female counterpart is pan-Euro, German born actress Diane Kruger, who is sharp and excellent. Oddly, she plays an illegal immigrant who isn't German at all, and pulls it off completely.
You might compare this movie to any number of recent international intrigue movies, but this one has at its core a particular kind of brain washing, or memory lapse, that is an echo of Jason Bourne (and a bit more believable, in a way, since Neeson doesn't play a superhero in any sense). It also has a resemblance to a recent Liam Neeson movie, "Taken," where he again plays the disgruntled everyman on the warpath for justice against his dignity (his daughter was kidnapped in that one).
I did mention, though that the movie patently absurd. I'll give one example at the start--he forgets his briefcase at the airport and realizes this at the hotel and instead of just popping his head in the door to tell his wife he's going back to get it, he just hails a cab and is gone. Then, in the cab, there is no cell service. In downtown Berlin. Okay, it's a conspiracy, and they've tampered with his phone and his wife is really a double-agent plant and so it's all logical. Except not quite. You'll see.
But because it's so implausible, you do give up worrying about it being at all true and just go for the fantasy, like maybe "Minority Report" gets away with by just setting it a bit in the future. "Unknown," with its wishy-washy title, is hard to hate, because it's fast and fun, but it's hard to especially like or admire, either. That much is known.