Indelicate Stitching.

Rating: 5/10 (26 November 2011)

Every time one of these characters suffers a trauma and can't recall his true identity -- whether it's Matt Damon in "The Bourne Identity" or Geena Davis in "The Long Kiss Goodnight" -- they always discover in the end that they are amnesic assassins. Inevitably they're assassins. They never wake up to find that they used to be bus boys in a restaurant or gas station attendants on the night shift. They're always skilled killers.
It's no surprise that that's what happens to Liam Neeson in this action-filled and thoroughly routine thriller.
The writers, the director, and everyone else associated with this production have a lot to answer for because the central idea of questionable identity is itself so packed with resonance. Who among us hasn't asked himself, "Who the hell am I really?" But that's the genre. It has its cachet. More than that, though, is the generic form itself: the person who finds himself adrift, a stranger in a strange land, where the people have queer customs and don't speak the same language and nobody understands what you say or, if they understand, can't bring themselves to believe it, as in Roman Polanski's "Frantic", a much better film despite its absurdity. That's the glorious summit. A guy who doesn't know who he is, in a place in which he doesn't know his way around. I once found myself in that position -- trying to locate a toilet in a huge hotel in an exotic land, and it was no picnic, let me tell you.
This is one cliché cobbled together with every other cliché the writers could think of. The goal is strictly commercial. "Art" is somebody's name.
We have -- spectacularly -- an urban car chase for a change. The cutting is instantaneous. The night-time streets are crowded with traffic (but not enough to impede the speeding cars), slippery, and glistening with neon reflections. The horns of terrified innocent motorists blare and dwindle with the Doppler effect. Look out -- there's a trolley coming! Shots of the hero's twisted face last a fraction of a second. One car tries to bump the other off the street at high speed. A sedan slides into a 180 degree turn. One of them hits a pile of garbage and does a half twist in the air before landing on its roof and sliding to a halt amid a shower of fake sparks.
Why go on? Well, one more thing that always bamboozles me because it violates one of Newton's laws. In desperation, Neeson grabs up a sliver of broken mirror and plunges it into the villain's neck without its doing any damage to his hand. It's like seeing one fighter decking another by bumping foreheads.
I kind of like Liam Neeson. His drooping nose begins in the middle of his forehead and he looms over everyone else on the streets of Berlin. (He would loom even more gigantically if it were Tokyo.) I enjoyed his Russian companion too. She's not staggeringly beautiful but Russian accents sound so compellingly fragile in women. Neesom's "wife", on the other hand, can't really act believably but doesn't have to. No one has ever looked more elegant and cool and blond in a black backless dress.
Best performance award -- envelope, please -- Frank Langella. From a handsome Lothario in the 60s he's turned into a marvelous character actor. He's the only person in the film who gives a truly convincing performance, but Bruno Ganz as a sympathetic botanist isn't far behind. Langella gets the best lines too, though the writers don't spare him the clichés either. Best One-Way Ticket To Purgatory -- Flavio Labiano, the cinematographer, for yet another ghoulish green action movie. Any more of this and I'll have to ask the nurse for Dramamine.