Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) and his wife (January Jones) have just arrived at a conference in Berlin where he is a guest speaker. Upon arriving at the hotel, he finds he left his briefcase in the airport and jumps into a cab to get to the airport to get it back. On the way he is in an accident and wakes up 4 days later in a hospital. Upon returning to the hotel he finds no one has ever heard of him, and his wife is attending the conference with a different guy and has never heard of him. Something sinister is going on as he knows who he is, but no one else in the world seems to know him. Fortunately he finds a few friends along the way who believe him, and someone is out to kill him so it sets off on a chase of trying to discover who he is and why everyone is after him.

This was a really exciting and hard to predict movie. The outcome was nothing like I expected it to be. It’s full of action, gun battles, car chases, and lots of fights. But it’s also a very complex situation he’s caught in and there’s a lot of suspense and excitement (and confusion in trying to figure it all out). Liam is excellent in this role, and it’s one of his best. Diane Kruger as the mysterious illegal Gina the cab driver who saves Dr. Harris but doesn’t want to be found later is also very good. January Jones and Aidan Quinn mostly mail in their roles, but they are put in a role that is very one dimensional so it’s not really their fault. But the action and adventure in this movie never stops and keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout. There are even a couple surprise moments in the film that made me drop my popcorn!

I really enjoyed this film, and if you a action, mystery, suspense kind of person, you will too. Very worthwhile to catch this one in the theater where the action is big and the sound is excellent. I highly recommend this film.

==Written by Ed Goettman ==

==From: Ed's Review Dot Com (www.edsreview.com)==

On the list of sounds most likely to be heard at festival press screenings—sniggering, catarrh-infused snoring, martyrly sighs accompanied by weary seat-shifting—spontaneous mid-film applause falls in the “rare to never” column, while enthused whooping lies several inches east of the page. Yet both these noises erupted in approximately three-quarters of the way through the Berlinale unveiling of Jaume Collet-Serra’s cheerfully preposterous thriller “Unknown,” following a scene where a hefty chunk of the German capital’s iconic Hotel Adlon is blown to smithereens, taking at least one particularly un-mournable character with it.

Of course, it could just be that the hometown crowd relished seeing a renowned local snoot-center get taken down a notch in fiction. And given that the “Unknown” screening directly followed that of the final film in a decidedly wholewheat (and not terribly good) Competition lineup, critics may have been more predisposed than usual to a slab of processed entertainment. Even with these mitigating factors, however, the critics’ collective astonishment at just how much honest-to-goodness fun they were having was palpable in that outburst of atypical behavior; by this point, even this writer’s frequent chuckles seemed to be in collaboration with the film.

Certainly, nothing about “Unknown's" blue-steel marketing materials, one-word Rent-a-Title or family-man-in-peril premise promised anything better than (or even distinguishable from) star Liam Neeson’s last foray into Eurotrash genre territory, Pierre Morel’s joylessly nasty if bewilderingly popular slave-trade actioner “Taken.” But if the implacably humorless Neeson seems merely to have wandered from one set to the other, stopping for three years only to change into a dapper wool suit, the movie around him has gained a little class and a lot of wit, even as its Jarlsberg script struggles to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Spanish helmer Collet-Serra, who unsurprisingly cut his teeth on music videos, has some form in enjoyably dressing up the disposable—his 2005 “House of Wax” remake dispatched of Paris Hilton with some style, while 2009’s well-cast devil-child outing “Orphan” was very nearly good—while betraying no directorial personality to speak of. He continues that trajectory in “Unknown,” this time by attempting to disguise himself as Roman Polanski, and his film as the man’s underrated Harrison Ford potboiler “Frantic” – a parallel strikingly obvious from the opening scenes, as Ford/Neeson et femme nuzzle in the back of a taxi. And if the masquerade proves that a slumming master and a reaching hack don’t quite meet in the middle, cribbing off material that was itself openly cribbing off Hitchcock gives the resulting film a lot more room to be playful.

Admittedly, this reference point was already prescribed for the filmmaker by writers Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell. Their elaborately incoherent screenplay filches so unapologetically from Polanski’s film as to qualify as po-mo homage, in respects both large (the shared primary what-happened-to-my-wife dynamic, the wrong-suitcase MacGuffin, the interchangeability of Emmanuelle Seigner and Diane Kruger’s riot-grrrl sidekicks) and oddly small (must Ford and Neeson both be in Europe for scientific conferences?). To discuss the plot of “Unknown” is to mar the fun you’ll have predicting exactly where it’s going, but at the risk of ruining any drinking games, here’s the opening gambit: Neeson plays American botanist Martin Harris, whose cosy arrival in Berlin with wife January Jones is disrupted by a near-fatal crash at the hands of Kruger’s fettuccine-haired immigrant taxi driver.

Cue memory loss, cue identity theft, cue sweetly dead-eyed January not knowing who the hell he is—and that’s before photogenic hired assassins and doddering ex-Stasi men get involved. Just when you think you’re on top of things, it turns out this whole charade within a charade has something to do with the DNA for sustainable corn farming… because, well, obviously. Cornwell is the son of peerless espionage novelist John Le Carré, but plotting expertise is evidently not a hereditary trait.

The brain jellifies just recalling this stuff, but this unreservedly stupid film takes such sincere delight in its telegraphed twisting that the audience winds up eagerly egging it on in this regard. It’s hard to tell at what precise point we start playing on Collet-Serra’s team, but the eminent professionalism of his silliness—no irony is required to appreciate his lickety-split way with action set pieces, notably one stonking car chase through Berlin’s central shopping district—must have something to do with it.

The pleasingly haphazard cast is even more of an asset: if Neeson is enjoying himself as much as we are, he daren’t show it, but the supporting players have no such qualms. MVP honors must go to Bruno Ganz, mayonnaising his native accent with heroically camp relish as a retired Stasi officer turned private dick: his languid, chin-stroking readings of single words like “deeee-tailz” and “Leeeeeip-zig” are to be treasured. (He also forms one half of the strongest scene here, a sad, brittle mano-a-mano with a superbly arch Frank Langella that belongs in a different film altogether.) Equally (and rather more surprisingly) game is Kruger, though quite why the actress is required to play a Bosnian immigrant when she is on home turf for once defies explanation, not that anyone would demand one after the actress’s unwittingly golden delivery of the line, “Zey keeled my femly in Bossnia!”

Such are the pleasures, then, that “Unknown” offers in spades, to the extent that it’s helpful to have one legitimately terrible performance amid the ensemble—poor January Jones, so tersely brilliant in “Mad Men” and so utterly petrified here as a kind of savoir-feh Hitchcock Barbie—to remind you of the robotic genre exercise this film could have been. To compare Jones with her co-stars here is to observe what separates “Unknown” from “Taken,” or indeed most artless multiplex filler of its ilk: in the business of bottom-line entertainment, sometimes the difference between good and bad lies only in getting the joke.

==Written by [Guy Lodge]==

==From: In Review Online (www.inreviewonline.com)==

Taking a cue from Memento, Unknown uses flashbacks to tell its story, which is full of intrigue. A group of seemingly unrelated men (played by Greg Kinnear, Joe Pantoliano, Jim Caviezel, Berry Pepper, and Jeremy Sisto) find themselves in an abandoned warehouse, and each one claims he is suffering from amnesia. Somehow, they had been involved in a kidnapping plot, but when they come to, the men have no clue which of them are the perpetrators and which are the victims. The film has the makings of a convincing thriller, but where it fails is in its attempt to be overly clever. For a suspense story to work, the filmmaker has to be willing to divulge a few clues along the way. (For instance, how did the men all lose their memories at the same time?) The problem is that Matthew Waynee's script is long on words, but short on meaning, leaving the viewer impatient and frustrated long before the film fades to black. --Jae-Ha Kim