unknown

Unknown was pretty average and thus, after a few false starts, gets only a short amount of my mental energy expended on it.

Liam Neeson is on a plane with his hot wife and her improbable hair. Upon landing in Berlin, where he’s about to give a speech on bio-who-cares, he gets in a taxi which swerves to avoid a fridge and then lands in the river. When he gets out of hospital and barrels towards his hotel, no one knows who he is—his wife doesn’t recognise him, and someone else is standing in his place, with his name tag on. Was he never who he thought he was? If he is, what is happening? And why didn’t he get a haircut before the movie started so it wouldn’t flop everywhere and distract the viewer?

This movie had a lot of potential—Neeson is a solid actor, the idea is pretty interesting, and the actual outcome not at all flat. But it’s stuck with some overly ridiculous car chase scenes—not one but two separate incidents with cars driving down pedestrian paths (once backwards!) with no honking, and all you can do is think: is this one person’s life/sanity worth the potential death of everyone who decided daringly to walk on the footpath today? And while on the carnage discussion, why does pretty much everyone involved, or barely involved, have to die? I just stopped being concerned about people because I assumed they would be eventually shot in the head, and never was invested enough in the characters in the first place to care.

In Summary: Below Expectations. There’s probably a worse movie out there at the moment (I’m making brash assumptions here about Disney’s Handy Manny Motorcycle Adventure, which is unfair of me) but it couldn’t be more middle of the road if it were that machine what paints stripes in the middle of roads.