Feckin' Shite

Liam Neeson reacts to being panned by AARP magazine.

Full disclosure: I'm going to spoil some aspects of Unknown, so if you want to see it, skip this post until afterwards.

I know it was a big hit ($145 million), but I really hated Taken, aka Not Without My Daughter as re-imagined by Spike TV. Bone-crunchingly violent despite its PG-13 rating, it was the sound of one reactionary hand clapping as ex-CIA daddy (Neeson), heavily invested in the evil-that-men-do worldview, warns his teen daughter of the perils of international travel -- and naturally she goes to Paris and immediately gets kidnapped by white sex slave traders, shot up with drugs and auctioned off to rich A-rabs. (The worst things that have happened to me on trips to Paris are stepping in merde du chien and being ignored by waiters.)

Now comes Unknown, which is openly marketed as The Bourne Identity meets Taken (because he can't remember who he is in this one). Set in a wintery Berlin and shot in varying grades of white, gray and blue that often makes it look softly out of focus, which is either a kind of tell or crappy film stock (per one of my chums in projection), Unknown is told from the POV of Dr. Martin Harris (and he's really, really fond of the "Dr."), a botanist arriving to Berlin for some sort of Biotech conference, accompanied by his wife Liz, a role sleepwalked by January Jones.

But Dr. Martin Harris is a Ph.D., a doctor(!) -- and after going through Customs, he puts his passport in his briefcase (not his inner overcoat pocket, like anyone over the age of 12 who's traveled abroad would do) and then leaves the briefcase at the airport curb. The credits are barely over, and I'm already irritated by a plot device...good job, lazy screenwriters! (When you, and Dr. Harris, find out who's who at the end, this makes even LESS sense, because it happens before he bumps his head and gets all forgetful and shit.)

Dr. Harris hops in a cab to hightail it back to the airport, but it plunges into a river (the Spree?) to avoid hitting a motorcyclist, the botanist bumps his noggin and spends four days in a coma. He remembers his name and eventually why he's in Berlin, but when he goes to the hotel to reunite with what he assumes will be his frantic wife, she claims not to know him, and Aidan Quinn is pretending to be Herr Doktor You-Know-Who.

The remainder of the film features Neeson in grim action mode, finding the cab driver who fled to accident scene, getting creeped out by people staring at him and talking on cell phones (dude, it's Germany -- get used to it), being followed on the U-Bahn, driving and crashing a fleet of Mercedes cabs like he's to the autobahn born, hooking up with a former Stassi agent-turned-private-detective randomly recommended by a nurse shortly before her strangulation (because yeah, that could happen), being naked in a shower one minute and clothed and on a roof 30 seconds later, and punching, kicking and shooting people with sociopathic precision, all of which seems entirely unrelated to the study of botany.

By the end of the film, several of the characters are not who we think they are, but I had so little invested in the story I really didn't care, with one exception. Diane Kruger plays Gina, the Bosnian cab driver, who seems genuinely upset by perpetuators of violence who are pursuing Dr. Harris, likening them to the type of men who slaughtered her family. Why then does she go off with that type of man at the film's end? It's one thing for the guy to be ammoral enough to not judge himself (although even Dexter Morgan is not that ammoral), but for her to be okay with it is a loud, sour note.

On the plus side, as Bobby Sol Hurok (John Candy) on SCTV would say -- January Jones blow'd up. She blow'd up real good.

*Looking for an excellent thriller? Check out The Day of the Jackal, Fred Zinnemann's 1973 adaptation of the Frederick Forsyth thriller of the same title. It's set in 1963, and is about an assassination plot against Charles De Gaulle. Edward Fox is fabulous as the enigmatic Jackal, a clear antecedent to George Clooney's assassin in The American.