Imagine Ronin (1995) welded to The Fugitive (1993), but without the tough unsentimentality of Frankenheimer’s film or the wit and conscience of the Ford movie. Then combine with a purely cosmetic appreciation of what made the recent Bourne trilogy really terrific, smart genre cinema; include the sinister politics, the amnesiac hero, the music video styled flashbacks and a long car chase staged on the slick, wet streets of a large European city. Or, to put it another way, Unknown is 21st century spy movie boilerplate. Frantic and breathless, it hurtles along on loads of plot and sheer technique without claim on coherence, towards a plot punch line that’s not so much a let-down as it is a con. As in, it’s so earnest and 'sophisticated’ there is a sense that its talk of terrorism, its paranoid mood where all foreigners are on the take or the make, victims or dupes, its naive yearning for a 'better America’ and its sincere existentialist musings about 'identity’ will, by movies end, be folded into some pithy, take-home-and-think-about-it insight into the world and its issues"¦
Well, no. Unknown is, reduced to essentials, a flat-out garden variety spy movie where no thoughtful subtext or conscious may intrude (at least in a way that’s compelling enough to distract from its ordinariness). It might name-check recent atrocities like ethnic cleansing, the Cold War, and troubles in the Middle East, but its only real interest is blowing stuff up and creating a feeling of malice. Being lightweight is no bad thing, but its trashy credentials are messed up and confused by director Jaume Collet-Serra and his tendency to smear the dramatic scenes with a feeling that the film is really about, well, something.
The movie’s attack of sincerity begins with the casting. Liam Neeson reeks of goodness, of credibility, as both an actor and a persona. Putting him in a movie is like a promise of substance. With his deep, quivering voice, honest eyes and natural delivery, he can make the dumbest lines play (a whopping big help here). Still, he’s not given much to do.
Neeson plays a scientist, Martin Harris, on visit to Berlin for a conference, with his beautiful wife, Elizabeth (January Jones, doing a clever variation on her Mad Men role). He gets a cab, driven by an illegal Bosnian refugee, Gina (Diane Kruger). There’s an accident (actually a very good suspense scene) and Harris wakes up four days later. He’s lost his papers, and no one knows him, believes him or trusts him. When he finally tracks down Jones he finds Aidan Quinn has replaced him as Martin Harris and his wife seems to be going along with it. Is Neeson crazy? Quite a few embarrassing scenes follow, all based on the device of a good, honest chap doing his best to convince, doctors, cops, security guys – people in authority – that he is who he claims to be.
In the great tradition of spy movies, Unknown has an unlikely couple; Neeson enlists Gina to help him out. (In a novel twist on this trope she doesn’t do this by bedding him"¦ she ends up back where she started, driving a cab!) Will any of this make sense? Will Neeson change his expression from dignified humility to cool irony? The answer to the first question is yes; but it does so in the way much cherished by pulp-fiction writers and devotees everywhere, which is to produce a very lengthy explanation about how nothing is quite what it seems. (A variation on 'We see the truth only when we recognise finally who we are.’) The answer to the second question is yes, too. But that’s a shame because Neeson was much easier to take as an innocent, than he is an operator.
Espionage on screen is all about tone. It can black farce or strictly political, it can be light, superficial, one big ad for up-scale consumer products. Or it can be hard, oblique, a study of character like The American or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). Unknown wants to have the fun of Bond and at the same time it wants to make a pass at being timely. That’s a blind ambition.
Still, there are traces of intelligence (no pun intended) whenever Bruno Ganz, as an old spy, enters the story. He plays Ernest, a grandfatherly ex-Stasi spook. He makes jokes about getting old and the old days of the Cold War when the stakes had clarity and the game was smarter. These are the quietest, best scenes in Unknown.
You get the feeling that at some point Collet-Jerra felt he was making not only a spy movie but a movie about spy movies. But that kind of irony seems a little old-hat, so Unknown seems committed to deliver its body count with a straight face, even it’s all a bit of a romantic joke.
