Driven by an interesting storyline and a few quality twists, Jaume Collet-Serra's Unknown sucks the audience in with a quick start, but doesn’t maintain enough substance throughout to make it unique. As Liam Neeson runs around Berlin like a crazed lunatic trying to restore his identity, I found myself looking for a plot that was slightly more plausible.
Neeson plays Dr. Martin Harris, just arrived in Berlin to make an important speech. While his wife (Mad Men's January Jones) is busy checking them into their hotel, Harris realizes that his briefcase is missing and jumps into a taxi to go and find it. On his way back to the airport, he's involved in a car accident that leaves him in a four-day coma. When he wakes up, no one knows who he is and he has no forms of identification to prove it.
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2011.