Unknown (2011)

Here’s what I learned from Unknown: Diane Kruger will never race Formula 1, Frank Langella can never be trusted, and Liam Neeson should never be screwed with. Got it? Good.

In his latest Euro-set film, Neeson continues his foray into the unlikely role of AARP-reading ass-kicker. In 2008’s Taken, he was an ex-spy leaving no skull un-smashed as he tore up Paris in search of his teenage daughter. This time, he is Dr. Martin Harris, an American botanist invited to speak at a high-profile biotechnology symposium in Berlin.

Or is he?

When he arrives at his hotel with his pretty, dead-eyed wife Elizabeth (pretty, dead-eyed January Jones), he realizes that he’s accidentally left his briefcase–with his passport and all other forms of identification–at the airport. So he hops into a taxi driven by Gina (Diane Kruger) and tells her to floor it. But her attempts at Autobahn-speed driving cause them to go careening off a bridge into icy-cold waters, where she rescues him and then disappears before the cops arrive.

Martin takes a bump to the head in the accident and ends up in a coma for four days before surfacing with only incomplete and color-saturated flashbacks of his past. The one thing he does remember is his hot wife, who must certainly be wondering where he is. Two problems: lovely Liz now claims she has never seen him before and she is already married to a different Dr. Martin Harris (Aidan Quinn), one with the papers to prove it. All of a sudden, Neeson’s Harris starts being hunted by assassins, forcing him to seek help from a former Stasi spy named Ernst Jürgen (Bruno Ganz) and go on the lam with taxi driver Gina. Car chases and explosions ensue. Frank Langella appears and is as shady as we’ve come to expect Frank Langella characters to be. Langella and Ganz share the film’s most intense, suspenseful and enjoyable scene. And then, of course, Liam Neeson kicks everyone’s ass, all up close and personal.

But he doesn’t take names for nearly long enough. Although Unknown rests heavily on Taken’s laurels, it is lacking Neeson’s forceful, unrelenting bad-assness from that older film. I went into the theater eager to see more of that side of the actor but found instead an amnesia conceit, as adapted from a novel by Didier von Cauwelaert by screenwriters Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell. That means that the talented Mr. Neeson spends chunks of the film–when he’s not running for his life or being driven off of bridges or buildings by Ms. Kruger–looking befuddled and angrily chewing the scenery.

Martin does get the bloody best of more than one assassin in some mano-a-mano conflicts but it feels ad hoc and lacks a satisfying element of planning and intentionality. It’s difficult for a character to go on a giddy, violent retribution spree when he can’t remember if he’s supposed to be on one or that he has the skills to do it…unless that character is Jason Bourne. Unlike Bourne, however, Martin doesn’t slowly unravel the truth of who he is by deciphering clues along the way. The revelation comes abruptly late in the third act, after the film has coasted along with little or no plot development for what feels like an age.

Another nod to the first of the Bourne films is Gina, the Euro girl helping the amnesiac protagonist on his adventures. Their relationship is complicated by the fact that our hero already has a wife, with whom he seems very much in love. But since both Jones and Kruger are young enough to be his daughters and both are as bland as dry, white toast, it’s hard to care which one he ends up with.

All that criticism doesn’t mean that Unknown isn’t a preposterous good time in parts. Director Jaume Collet-Sera almost redeems himself from last year’s Orphan by squeezing in about a half-dozen heart-pumping car-chase-and-crash scenes (I’m guessing the theory is if you do something well, you should do it often). One particularly preposterous but fun one involves Gina’s taxi facing down an assassin’s black SUV, while driving in reverse through the streets of Berlin.

These displays of well-choreographed stunt work–and the acting in that one terrific Langella/Ganz scene–are just enough to keep Unknown from going unseen.