It was a toss-up between Robert Redford’s two-hour-long history drama, The Conspirator, or Unknown, another Liam Neeson Euro-thriller, out on DVD now.
Redford’s drama didn’t seem to have much to do with contemporary matters like the trials of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners in a way that Arthur Miller’s The Crucible echoed the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts, so I decided to go with Unknown at the shorter “approximately 109 minutes”.
Neeson’s previous outing in Taken had him as a retired American special agent tracking down his teenage daughter, who gets abducted in Paris, and saving her from those throat-slitting damned Ayrabs. It was a really slick thriller and quietly racist too.
Now Dr Martin Harris (Neeson) and his wife, Elizabeth (January Jones), go to Berlin to attend a biotechnology conference, but when they get to a fancy hotel he realizes he’s forgotten his briefcase at the airport and catches a taxi back there without telling his wife. He’ll call her, he thinks, but – ta, da – his phone’s been disconnected. Something’s up. The music tells us thus.
Before you can say Sturm und Drang the taxi crashes and he knocks his head badly, but fortunately Diane Kruger is the taxi driver and saves him from the city’s icy river. Now, however, nobody believes that he is who he says and thinks he is. Cool idea. This could be good.
When Harris does finally track down the able taxi driver, Gina (Kruger), she avoids him like the plague because she is a gastarbeiter who doesn’t have her papers in order, but her one colleague, Biko (Clint Dyer), will play the nice black guy who can always be relied upon in these situations. Biko? Look, it’s not unusual to name your children after this or that hero, but a little context might have helped. Anyway, Biko goes the way of all nice, reliable black helpers.
One of the big clues in the movie is that this scientist turns out to be quite able with his fists and driving skills, but the best lines are given to veteran Swiss actor Bruno Ganz playing an ex-Stasi official. “We Germans are very good at forgetting. We forgot the war, we forgot forty years of communism…”
At least he doesn’t have to contend with Harris’s line to him: “I need you to help me prove I’m…me.” You can see Neeson had to do that one quite a few times. He seemed to be grimacing too when he asked Gina whether he could "crash" at her place. You could just imagine a typical Germanic response. "But we've crashed already once, why again?" But then she is Croatian and they know exactly what that old Sixties word stands for.
Things are not what they seem, of course, and when Frank Langella’s Rodney Cole visits Ganz’s Ernst Jürgen it becomes the best scene in the movie, fraught with tension and a clever surprise by cleverly echoing what Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann allegedly did in the same city, circa May 1945.
Don’t read further if you don't want more plot giveaways, because Harris turns out to be an…assassin, whose knock on the head actually had him believing he was really married to Liz, loved her and was a biotechnologist. It’s all been a brilliant set-up, or such are the attractions of the bourgeoisie.
Now Harris, who has killed numerous others, suddenly decides to save a German scientist who is about to give the world free, pesticide-resistant grain - with the generous backing of an Arab prince, almost as if to make up for that other bit of anti-Muslim filmmaking.
So you see what a knock to the head can do for you. You can change your personality, get exonerated for all the people you killed and then hop on to the bullet train with a new identity and great-looking blonde babe as the end credits start rolling. Simple.
Neil Sonnekus
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