Review - Unknown

After the fantastic Taken, I was hugely anticipating another great action flick from Liam Neeson in the form of Unknown.

Check out my review of the blu ray below.

Dr Martin Harris (Neeson) is a successful scientist with a beautiful wife (January Jones) and a career that is seeing him present in various seminars to some of the profession’s top personnel, things could not be any better. That is until a trip to Berlin goes terribly wrong. Arriving at a hotel, Martin realizes he has forgotten his suitcase and left it at the airport, and immediately heads back to retrieve the missing luggage. En route to the airport, his taxi is involved in a crash and plunges into the river, with Harris barely surviving, saved only by the quick thinking of the taxi driver, Gina (Diane Kruger), who soon flees.

Waking up in a hospital bed following a four day coma, his memory is initially blank but when it returns it appears that all is not what it seems. Identity-wise, nobody knows who he is and when looking for his wife and finding her, she blankly refuses all knowledge of who he is, and there is another man who seems to have stolen his identity. The question is how and why? Or is he not who he thinks he is? In an attempt to uncover the truth, he manages to track down the taxi driver who was involved in the car accident with him and together they work to uncover the truth whilst fending off a series of henchmen clearly sent to silence them. With their lives both in danger, can Martin and Gina escape the threat and finally uncover the secrets to Martin’s identity?

With such an intriguing premise, Unknown had all the signs to be the next Taken and was even dubbed this in the lead-up to release, unfortunately this is far from the case. Despite some promise coming from the initial unfolding of Martin Harris’ loss of identity, the film stutters along at an unsteady pace without a hint of Taken’s brilliance whatsoever. Neeson is solid, as ever, in the action thriller lead but he has very little support worth mentioning and is often isolated in attempting to salvage the viewers’ interest. Ultimately the pay-off and resolution to the story is different but rather unsatisfying mainly due to the fact that by the time you reach the finale little has helped to convince you that an answer is worth finding out. Disappointing really as Neeson’s Taken follow-up had the promise to match its predecessor.

Film Rating: 2 F’s out of 5