Review of Unknown (2011) by Shiira — 03 Mar 2011

Bosnian women are bad drivers. They can't avert refrigerators that fall off delivery trucks without their taxi cabs careening off a bridge and into the icy depths of the river. Luckily for the passenger's sake, Gina is strong, every bit a man's equal in an emergency.

With no time to waste, the cabbie frees herself from the sinking car and somehow has the presence of mind to save her wayfarer, Dr. Martin Harris, a botanist, who is in Berlin for a biotechnology conference, but at the moment of impact, is in a heap of trouble.

As the Spree River diversifies its body into the rapidly-filling cab, Gina, going all Lou Ferrigno on us, bashes in the rear window with a car jack and pulls the doctor out of the reappropriated vehicle, then carries him to the surface despite being, undoubtedly, dazes herself from the crash, and considerably smaller than her hulk-ish fare.

The rescue has such an over-the-top quality, it borders on wishful thinking, perhaps, a psychical emanation pouring out of the drowning botanist's mind. Maybe Martin is dead; maybe he never escapes his watery grave, a narrative ploy used to great effect in Herk Harvey's 1962 cult classic "Carnival of Souls", where a young woman emerges from the muddy waters on her own volition without realizing that she's dead.

People see Martin, accepting the man as corporeal, just as people saw Mary Henry, with the exception that she's the right woman, whereas he's the wrong man. Like the church organist, could he be dead, as well? The moviegoer doesn't quite know what to think when Martin is deemed unrecognizable by his trophy wife and made to be non-existent with the presence of a replacement, also named Martin Harris, who has the nametag to prove it.

Is Martin A in a parallel universe, or quite possibly, an amnesiac sitting in a padded cell at some mental institution, concocting a thriller of his own making? Throughout "Carnival of Souls", Mary is hounded by "The Man", an apparition seen through her eyes alone, and likewise, in "Unknown", an undefined man pursues Martin, making his first appearance in the tube, and the moviegoer can't know for certain if this slow-footed attacker really exists.

At the hospital, Martin's stalker violently disposes of his kindly nurse(the doctor is killed off-screen), but maybe the bespectacled killer is a man-made manifestation, maybe "Unknown" is a "Fight Club for Botanists".

What are the rules of the film, we ask. It's not until Gina can account for the hitman's tangibility, in which he and another hired man descend on her "quaint" apartment, do we start to rule out the notion that Martin suffers from a malady of the discognitive sort.

He's sane, we think. It's not him, after all, it's them; they're responsible for this pell-mell, so in light of Martin's sanity being confirmed through a second pair of eyes, the man at the biotech symposium claiming to be Dr.

Martin Harris must certainly be an impostor, right? Yes, but neither is "Martin" the preeminent science, a revelation that arrives later than it ought to, because the medical staff, Gina, and especially Ernst Jurgen, an ex-Stasi agent, who must know a thing or two about stringent interrogations, never ask Martin any questions, relative to his professional or personal life, that would expedite the so-called scientist's progress on the road to self-discovery.

Good as the scene between Ganz and Frank Langella may be, it has a gravitas that the comparably lightweight thriller doesn't really deserve, in which the resumed rivalry among the opposing coldwar era communist superpower stalwarts almost comes out of left field.

To me, the centerpiece scene should involve your star, but instead of sparring with words, Neeson's big turn isn't an acting one, but instead, is action-based when he goes mano-a-mano with a barely recognizable Aidan Quinn.

"I didn't forget everything. I remember how to kill you," Martin A tells Martin B, but in fact, he does forget quite a lot. Although this man and woman aren't husband and wife, they are quite in love, cold-blooded assassins with tender feelings for each other.

When our Martin calls the other Martin in the Eisenhower Suite(in the 2003 Didier Van Cauwelaert novel "Out of My Head", it's his home), we see Liz in the background, lounging on the bed, without a second pillow, indicating that she and this new guy are sleeping in different rooms.

She's monogamous. The sequence that takes us from the airport to the hotel where the assassins masquerade as a loving couple, to a great extent, is no masquerade, at all. Our nowhere man forgets this.

At the museum, the hired man receives the hired woman's kiss because he feels obliged to, believing Liz to be his lawful wedded wife. He's acting; she's not. She says, "I love you." It's not part of the script.

Nobody is watching them. One day, when this man fully recovers his memory, he'll realize, in hindsight, that the feeling was mutual.