Forget-Me-Not: A Review of 'Unknown'

‘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.

Colour Me Stupid: A Chastising of 'Red'

Okay, Hollywood.

Sit down.

We need to have a talk.

No, by “we need to have a talk”, I mean, you sit there and listen, okay?

Good.

I honestly don’t know where to begin. You’ve let me down. You’ve let the viewing public down. And most of all, you’ve let yourself down.

Don’t sit there and shrug like you don’t know what you did.

You know.

Really? You want me to spell it out?

Fine. We’re here to talk about Red.

Yes, I know you thought what you were doing was, what do the kids say these days, cool? But it wasn’t. Just because it stars a bunch of ageing popular actors like Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich, is based on a graphic novel, and has a fast-moving nonsensical plot, doesn’t make it acceptable, let alone “cool”. Don’t give me that “but Helen Mirren shoots an Uzi” defence. The people at E! might buy that, but you’ll get no sale from me. Helen Mirren firing a gun is just as lame as Jason Statham firing a gun if the film around them is lame – that’s basic movie maths.

Speaking of the plot: I know it’s only trashy fun and all that, but nonetheless, if you’re going to use the massacre of a Guatemalan village as the instigator of your torturous narrative, then treat it with some respect. You’ve no idea what I’m talking about do you? If your heroes are CIA killers, then you need to be quite careful about how you portray them.

Let’s look at Grosse Pointe Blank. Quiet, I know it’s old, but I’m trying to teach you something. There’s Martin Blank, right, and he’s an assassin. He kills people for a living. But the film is a comedy. It’s light-hearted.

Yes, I know so is Red, let me finish.

So Martin Blank kills some people in the film. Mostly these are anonymous thugs or out-and-out weirdoes. Martin is also afflicted with a terrible ennui, brought about by his job. He comes out at the other side of all the gunfights with a newfound respect for human life. This journey helps us associate with him as a protagonist. The tone of the film also lessens the unpleasantness of his character: other people each have a pithy, unbelieving remark when he says he’s a contract killer (“do you get dental with that?”/”can I join up?”/”good for you, it’s a growth industry”), and the reason he has been marked for death himself is a bizarre accident involving a stick of dynamite and a millionaire’s pet retriever.

Compare this catalyst with the one in Red: the massacre of a Guatemalan village. This, like the exploded dog, is an unseen event and one which is way, way down the list of narrative priorities. A dog being detonated is funny, if morbid. The slaughter of a native population, especially one seemingly based on true events in Salvador in 1981, is less of a laugh riot.

I’m not against using real occurrences to spin out a fictional narrative, even one as fanciful as this. But to do so without the least bit of explication, respect, or even basic interest … that’s just unnecessary. Then to do so without suggesting any culpability on the part of the central “sympathetic” characters (who covered the murders up for the CIA without any trace of conscience) and not even having the decency to explain the compartmentalised blame (on an American politician, of course) is bordering on corrosive.

Fine, no one watches these things for the plot.

Yes, The A-Team featured successful US adventurism in Iraq (as did Iron Man), and The Losers began with the hilarious sight of the death of several dozen children before ditching all mention of them. I know.

That doesn’t make what you did in Red okay.

Nor is it the most annoying thing about the film.

Everyone enjoyed the sight of black ops teams and submachine guns in suburbia in Mr & Mrs Smith, but let’s not call that film a masterpiece. Let’s also note that whatever spark the Brangelina vehicle had (beyond the stars) came from the (over)awareness of the absurd disconnect between the action and the setting.

In Red, pretty much everyone’s a spy and a killer, and people show up with grenade launchers and no-one bats an eye. Remember Star Wars, and how Han Solo was always bursting the pomposity with his cavalier, blue-collar wisecracks? And remember how George Lucas’s recent prequels sucked so, so much, in part because they lacked this outsider perspective to all the nonsense?

No, Mary Louise-Parker’s office-worker-along-for-the-ride does not count. Why? Because she becomes normalised to the violence almost instantly (compare that, if you will, to Jason Bourne’s companion Marie vomiting when she sees her first dead body), and is excised entirely from the drama in the third act.

And don’t get me started on the troublingly reductive attitude towards women, all of whom either need to be saved by men (even gun-toting Helen Mirren) or take their cues from them at every turn.

What else? Stealing music cues from the Bourne films, Mr and Mrs Smith, and The International is a fine way of confirming that your movie has no original ideas. I know Kick-Ass did the same thing. But you know what? Kick-Ass was lazy, crass filmmaking too.

I have more to complain about, but I think our time here is almost up.

It doesn’t matter that those guys on rotten tomatoes mostly thought it was “alright”. If they thought making Paul Bettany into a post-apocalyptic action-hero was “alright” would you do that too? Point taken. But then these are the people who thought Salt was “alright”. Jurassic Park 3 was “alright”. Give them a press-pack with a complimentary key ring and they’ll rave about The Expendables, and that thing was like an etch-a-sketch of a crayon drawing of a trailer for an action film a six-year-old heard about one time.

Yes, I could have been more forgiving.

But you’re spending a lot of money. More than that, you’re spending my good will.

And I think we’re both running perilously low on both.

Now get out of here and don’t do it again.

Running Up That Hill: A Review of 'Salt'

Why name a film Salt? And a Hollywood star vehicle blockbuster at that? This question concerned me before I saw the film, and it and many, many others echoed unanswered around my brain after it had finished. But only for about an hour, after which it is hard to remember much of anything about this contemporary espionage action thriller.

The pitch: Angelina Jolie plays CIA operative Evelyn Salt who is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. Films have been predicated on less, it’s true, but Salt takes minimal set-up to new extremes. In a half-hearted attempt to compensate it scatters brief and unenlightening flashbacks throughout, which only serve to emphasize the shallowness of the exercise.

Within minutes our protagonist is on the run, and watching Jolie run is the true purpose of this film, even though she runs like an eight-year-old girl being egged on by a demanding father at sports day. Salt’s sprinting athleticism does not so much dominate the film as it is the film, her movements through diverse spaces in leaps and bounds operating in the same manner as hyperactive editing in a Tony Scott film, or costumes and masks in a superhero narrative: it is the principle organising schemata around which all else revolves (check out an athletic act of vengeance towards the end, or compare the depictions of her body in the opening and closing scenes). The model is overtly Bourne-esque, but where Damon flinched Jolie pouts, moving as she does into each encounter with the innate knowledge that the framing, choreography and wirework will all be on her side.

Charitable viewers might call the sensations of the first act ‘ambiguity’, although I prefer ‘rudderlessness’. The third and fourth reels appear to have been lost, and moments after her flight from the authorities Salt is embroiled in the assassination of a foreign leader that in any other film would be the finale (it is foreshadowed accordingly, in a manner inescapably similar to that parodied by Shane Black in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and which could be called ‘Power Plant Climax’ syndrome). Having got this out of the way, Salt then casts around aimlessly for more drama, and goes off the rails in the same manner that seasons of 24 were wont to do at about the eighth episode.

The central conceit of highly trained undercover Russians attempts to commingle anxieties of the cold war and contemporary fears of terrorist sleeper cells, but it’s hard not to think of the recently exposed real-life agents in America whose political and strategic irrelevance would have been far more intriguing a focus, and would seem to be a better fit for both this cast (with quiet character actors like Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor in supporting roles) and director Phillip Noyce, whose Jack Ryan thrillers Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger would laugh Salt out of the situation room.

Then there’s the racism, which somehow manages to be both outdated and bland while still offending – writer Kurt Wimmer seems unaware that the cold war ever ended, or even that the Soviet Union dissolved. One cannot go too far critiquing the film for its one-dimensional and broadly villainous Ruskies, as the presentation of the American Commander-in-Chief – played, appropriately, by an actor named Hunt Block, who I hope was cast for that reason alone – is stupefyingly basic. President Block’s utter lack of charisma, characterisation, or distinguishing features (even the aforementioned 24 has moved on from white male leaders) seems to codify within Salt a response to any critique of its anti-Russia sentiment.

With an America, and Americans, this boring, we almost cheer the ushanka-wearing vodka-swilling black-coat-wearing Kalashnikov-wielding bastards on for wanting to spice the place up with a little … seasoning.

Notes Towards an Exploration of Space in Contemporary Action Cinema

Space has become fragmented. Blame Jason Bourne. Or possibly Jean Baudrillard. Jittery shots, quick editing, the desired response of dazzled confusion. Renowned (but occasionally doddery) film theorist David Bordwell calls it “intensified continuity” – the phenomenon whereby contemporary films feature a considerably shorter average shot length than ever before. More shots, more cuts, more action. As a result, the environment through which characters move becomes increasingly difficult for the spectator to map.

Some films respond by collapsing their existence towards a singularity. Paul Greengrass, a British director formerly involved in painstaking you-are-there recreations of such tragedies as Ireland’s Bloody Sunday, uses intensified continuity as a precision-tool of great dramatic and artistic effect. The set-piece in Waterloo station in Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum is the nadir of this form, the splintered world created through meticulous but frantic shooting and cutting a demonstration of the protagonist Jason Bourne’s lack of history (thanks to amnesia), but total grasp of his immediate situation even in the face of extreme pressure (thanks to relentless government indoctrination). The train station becomes his entire world, and the film depicts an attempt to grasp this vast space with something close to simultaneity. Attention is fleeting, jumping from this face to that, from the security camera to the exits. Waterloo station is depicted as fragments of vital concentration, not a coherent or meaningful entirety.




This is the postmodern environment as sensory barrage. There is a similar tendency in the television series 24, with its incessant and unenlightening split-screens gesturing towards an awareness of the wealth of incident, character, and information that accompanies the most cursory event. However, the constant pandering to the lowest attention span undoes such efforts – entire episodes seem to consist of a chain of people phoning each other and re-iterating the same conversation, without the creators or writers suggesting an awareness of the ‘Chinese-whispers’ potential of such a scenario. Space for Jack Bauer may not be highly structured, but it is entirely manageable.

Detailed mapping and navigation in this sort of drama seems impossible. Plots packed with incident keep moving, flitting from place to place, offering neither characters nor audience purchase on the surrounding environment. Nowhere better is this trend examined, and indeed parodied, than the most recent outing for James Bond, Quantum of Solace. Concluding in a bizarre hotel in the middle of the desert (indeed, there are few scenes in the film that do not take place in hotel rooms, lobbies, anonymous corridors or sleek performance spaces), the setting is a meaningless, depopulated postmodern space. As the hotel itself is unconnected from a metropolitan, or even rural surrounding, so too the sections of the hotel itself fail to cohere. The central space of the hotel, across which walkways are suspended in mid-air, is like something from a science-fiction film.

Even the destruction of this site by multiple explosions, previously such an easy fallback pleasure of action films in the 80s and 90s, is undercut by the nonsensibility of the devastation. In the finest shot of the film, if not the entire series, the villain flees from an explosion as it bursts through a wall and shatters a room-spanning sheet of glass; the space may be hollow, but the only way to understand it is through action. What was previously inert and functionless (the room, the glass, the hotel itself) becomes dazzling in its beauty and its dynamism. Spectacle and excitement become tools with which to explore the meaning of architecture, and our interaction with it.




This re-examination of a space once inert made ferocious is used to great effect in the thriller The International. Extended sequences in Milan, New York and Istanbul successfully ingrain themselves with the cities they visit without excessive sequences of “local colour”. The centrepiece in Frank Lloyd Wright’s coiled Guggenheim museum (shot for the most part inside a 98% to scale replica built in Germany) offers initially the use of architecture-as-backdrop, as detectives follow an assassin up the rotunda where he is to meet his handler. The installation on display is a plethora of cinema screens showing occasionally stagey, occasionally vibrant scenes. The backdrop of the set itself is littered with further backdrops.

When the bullets start to fly the space is radically transformed. Balconies become shooting galleries, walls become shields, punters become collateral damage, and museum pieces become deadly weapons. The audience is rushed away from the ramp, into a staircase, then back to the rotunda. Our awareness of the environment, previously one of quiet (museum-like?) contemplation becomes one of life-or-death sensory necessity. The last shot of the space is a slow track forward and pan up, asking us to see how our awareness of the building has changed, progressed, clarified. Unlike the shifting mass of people and camera movement of Waterloo, this architecture is built from the ground-up within the structure of the scene and the shots that compose it.



Creating his own environments to explore, James Cameron frequently offers a meticulous recomposing of these spaces as his films cross their halfway point. In The Abyss, set almost entirely aboard an oil platform based on the ocean floor, a tour of the intricacies and layout of the rig is interwoven with the narrative during the first hour and a half. When an accident cripples the vessel, and a visiting Navy SEAL team turn against the blue-collar crew, this knowledge is redeployed as a potential for salvation. Reviewers often term this sort of action “hard-earned” – those who paid attention earlier are rewarded by a comforting feeling of awareness and security. Inversely, it is the cardinal sin of any narrative for a solution to be offered that has no preceding conditions for its existence (the plotting equivalent of the fight scene in which the hero triumphs at the moment their plight seems most dire by kicking their attacker in the genitals). Titanic actually shows the sinking of the ship twice, first in one of the early scenes aboard a salvaging vessel in the modern day, as an aged survivor is lectured using a rudimentary computer program as to what damage the iceberg did, and how the subsequent flooding of the compartmentalised sections of the hull led to the front of the ship sinking, the rising of the rear section, the tearing of the ship in two, then subsequent vertical dragging down of beneath the waves. Later, when a far more advanced computer program depicts the same events, there is no need for an over-calm character explaining what is occurring, or expositional shots of the hull under water. “What’s going on!” asks Rose to her lover: “I don’t know” he replies. But we do. The spectacle of action is only offered after forensic enquiry and two hours of dramatic action exploring every deck, engine room and cabin.

Space, then, does not have to be fragmented to be explored. The Waterloo Station of The Bourne Ultimatum exists in shards, while the hotels on Quantum of Solace seem not to exist at all. The Guggenheim of The International is scrutinised and given a new life, while the self-created spaces of James Cameron films exist as lined-up dominoes for thrilling set pieces. The action film offers a method of dynamically exploring architecture, turning what could be merely a backdrop into a tangible environment which can be mapped in a variety of unexpected ways.