Unknown

Unknown is a serviceable psychological thriller, but one so forgettable that I often look at this title in my list of 2011 films and wonder if I actually saw it. Even reading the IMDB plot summary I can’t be sure.  But referring to my notes I see that I did indeed see this movie, and that I thought it was a decent entertainment.  The rather derivative story concerns a man who wakes up from a car accident to find himself in an alternate reality where his wife doesn’t recognize him and another man has his identity.

The film doesn’t really work on any psychological or philosophical level.   It is simply a popcorn movie manufactured to give audiences mild thrills rather than anything to think about.  Still, the cast is good, especially Bruno Gantz.  It is amazing how Liam Neeson, who practically gave up on movies after his unpleasant experience on The Phantom Menace, has become the new Harrison Ford--starring as the cool, handsome, industrious everyman in so many summer action films.  Indeed this French-made film does have some of the spark of the Harrison Ford film Frantic that Roman Polanski made in 1988.  But the plot lacks the effective straight-forwardness of Frantic, and suffers from the hyper-kinetic shakycam style of filmmaking favored by most modern action films.  Too bad--with a little more humor and a little more formal cinematic technique, this film could have been more of a Hitchcockian puzzle, rather than a Greengrassian roller-coaster.  Still, a movie like this is only as good as its leading man, and Neeson, like Ford, is a good actor who can sell the drama of contrived narrative script beats, which is no small thing.