‘We Germans are experts at forgetting,’ states Bruno Ganz’s private detective when he is approached by Liam Neeson’s befuddled Dr Martin Harris, a man whose first trip to Berlin began with lost luggage at the airport and – several taxi crashes, spousal shunnings and murder attempts later – has only got worse. So what looked from the trailers like a re-heated version of Neeson’s unfortunate 2008 action splurge Taken is actually an amnesia-thriller in the Bourne mold. Unknown, at the very least, knows from what cinematic cloth it is cut, but it is at its best when it dabbles in more unexpected material.
While Jason Bourne had no idea who he was and had to earn himself a moral compass – not to mention the approval of demur colleagues, matriarchal CIA directors, and grouchy Parisian mini-owners (women all) – in Unknown it is everyone around Dr Harris who seems to have suffered anamnesis adjustment, yet without any concurrent trauma. His wife looks just as lovely as she did four days and one coma earlier, only now she claims not to know who our hero is, and is even clutching the arm of a doppleganger who, she assures, is actually Dr Martin Harris.
Given that his wife is played by walking shard of frosted ice January Jones, and the seemingly usurping paramour by an effectively similar Aiden Quinn (if only the budget, and his ego, would have stretched to casting Harrison Ford for this role, an actor many reviews have compared Neeson too here, then the face-offs between these two characters would have sparked with a flinty meta-intensity), it is briefly conceivable that Mrs. Harris just simply hasn’t noticed the change. Yet that’s not it, and either she’s complicit in some nefarious plot, or the good Dr Harris (that is, the good Dr Harris) is losing his mind.
The introduction of Mr. Ganz only adds to the confusion (what is an actor like him doing in trash like this?), but when his character begins to talk of the bad old pre-unification days, and later uses Stasi informants to aid Harris’s search for existential security, we realize that he’s here because there really are meat on these bones. Then there’s Diane Kruger’s cab driver, forced to work overtime in an Arab café and in no way willing to help out. Another dead-end and more crumpled euro notes spent. It is now when we might start to realize the depth of the film’s depiction of Berlin, a world city as much as London, but with a gaping absence that twenty years of glass and steel architecture and Checkpoint Charlie souvenirs cannot efface. This is a city hostile towards embarrassment and insecurity even as it breeds ambiguity and chilly uncertainty: just ask Bourne, who had to overcome the chaos of rush hour Alexanderplatz to get his way, or Jodie Foster’s Kyle Pratt in Flightplan, whose grief-ridden plummet into possible insanity began at the same metro station Dr Harris spies someone following him. Or does he?
Certainly, there is no getting away from the fact that there’s a hulking great car chase in the middle of the film, and even if it is an effective set-piece (and it is really rather good), it still bears witness to the stamp of producer Joel Silver and the need for blockbuster action cred. Yet you’ll never catch Neeson with a gun in hand, and while pedestrians might be expendable, minor characters are not. There is a subtly nuanced (and possibly unintended) naming and mourning of an early victim, while subsequent collateral damage is decried in a scene that would normally exist only between jump-cuts.
All of which makes the inevitable slide (and it is inevitable, and it is a slide) all the more regrettable, even if the mechanics of the revelation are handled somewhat smoother than those in the aforementioned Flightplan. Even so, among the nonsense that riddles the final reel there are some nice details (I’ve never seen a Hitchcock blonde treated quite like that before), and the finale should not scrub the positive qualities of the rest of the film from your mind – even if it is precisely this logic which Unknown itself frustratingly advocates by way of conclusion. It is a resourceful piece of entertainment, derivative and simple-minded on the surface, but while the twists may be under-developed, it is in the margins that the film is able to pleasantly surprise. This alone makes it at the very least memorable.
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