Unknown Review

• 11th Jul 2011

Liam Neeson truly impressed his audience when Euro-thriller Taken came out a couple of years back. The film was an unexpected mega-hit and has a sequel in the works. Neeson is back in Europe, this time Berlin, in this new identity thriller.

This time he plays a respectable doctor visiting Berlin with his wife (January Jones). But upon arriving he leaves a bag at the airport and en-route to fetch it ends up in an accident and the cab he’s in, driven by Diane Kruger, ends up in the river.

Several days later he wakes from his short-term coma to find that the world seems to have forgotten who he is, including his wife. Or at least they know his name, but not him. Instead it seems that another man has assumed his identity (Aiden Quinn). And this is just the beginning.

Neeson embarks on a paranoid journey to try to prove his existence to those that will listen and ends up knee deep in all sorts of trouble as a result. Of course by the end you know he’s going to be handing asses back to people he’s taken apart. Perhaps not quite as brutally as he did in Taken, but there’s no denying that Neeson (even in his fifties) is a tour de force of pain when he wants to be. Let’s remember that the guy is huge in real life. It’s also nice to see him onscreen again with Aiden Quinn (who seems to have been absent for far too long) since they both starred in Michael Collins many a year ago.

Unknown isn’t perfect by any means, but it gets the job done well. The performances are all pretty good, the action and tension works well enough and it comes in around a time that you’d expect. Released in the Spring and filmed on a moderate budget, this one will do just fine until Taken 2, when Neeson can take the gloves off again.

Steven Hurst