Solid thriller with solid mystery but lacks desperation and claustrophobia in the delivery

Rating: Null/10 (17 August 2011)

It is a familiar scenario in films to find an ordinary man pulled into a crime bigger than him and unable to turn to the authorities. Hitchcock did it several times (39 Steps, Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest), Johnny Depp did it in Nick of Time and now Liam Neeson gets a run at it. The plot here sees him in Berlin when a car accident puts him in a coma for a few days. When he comes to (without ID) his wife seems to not know him and indeed already has a husband of his name, and who also has full knowledge of everything he claims to know as well. Starting to believe maybe he is crazy, he rapidly learns he is not whenever someone tries to kill him.
Having already punched and kicked his way across most of Paris in Taken, here we get a less action-orientated film in Berlin and the outcome is not quite as fun as Taken although it is a bit more engaging in terms of plot and ideas. The viewer is held pretty well by events on the screen and most of us will have hoped for at least a semi-decent solution to the mystery. Personally I didn't see the solution coming and, although a bit so-so, it was still good enough to do the job and kinda make sense within the internal logic of the film. However since the solution is reasonable simple (comparatively) and comes quickly, the film does spend a lot of time hanging around in the mystery, doing not too much till the solution comes. There are chases and fights but where the film fails is a sense of the world collapsing around Harris. He doesn't quite have the desperation that Harrison Ford had in Frantic (for example) and it is less engaging and exciting as a result.
It still goes through the motions though and some of it is enjoyable as a basic thriller but the sense of losing everything and being desperate to get to the bottom of it all is only ever spoken – not really ever felt. The direction from Collet-Serra is part of it; everything looks professional and money has been spent but he doesn't find the claustrophobia that he needed to find in his scenes and, when it comes down to what the film needed him to do, he is by the numbers, letting the plot do the telling, not his camera. Neeson is a solid oak again – he doesn't have a lot of flair but considering he is 60 next year he convinces in the action roles he has had recently; he cannot find his character's panic though, which is a shame. Kruger is solid in support, as is Jones and Quinn. I liked Quinn here as he had a good character and played it well (but will he ever get away from the YouTube thing?). Langella is a nice bit of casting as he does have a presence naturally.
Overall Unknown is a solid thriller that goes by the numbers, provides the solid solution it had to find and gets out with car chases and guns in its wake. It lacks a real delivery that would have made it great though; it is delivered without any great sense of what it is doing and the director never gets the desperation and claustrophobia that the mystery really could have done with to engage the viewer. It is OK to watch, but watching was all I was doing.