"Unknown"

I saw “Unknown,” starring Liam Neeson. Well, it was rather good. Maybe I thought so simply because I’d expected little of it. But even so it was at least not bad.

The movie opens with a scene of an American biologist, Dr. Martin Harris, coming to Berlin with his wife to attend an international conference. They caught a taxi at the airport to go to the hotel where they had planned to stay. When they arrived at the hotel, however, he realized he had left his suitcase behind in the airport, and got another taxi alone to go back there. But the taxi got involved in an accident on the way, and dived into the river. Butting his head strongly with the side window, Harris fell into a comma, and when he woke up next time, he found himself at a hospital in Berlin. Though a bit confused about his bearings at first, after watching a TV news program featuring the conference, he remembered why he was in Germany and where he and his wife had planned to stay. He got so worried about his wife, who must have been at a loss about her husband’s whereabouts, that against his doctor’s advice he went to the hotel to tell her he was alive. But what awaited him there was a very enigmatic situation: he found his wife was with another man who also called himself Dr. Martin Harris, and she told him she had never met him before. After some failed attempts to prove he was Dr. Martin Harris, he swooned again and was sent back to the hospital. Although he was still inclined to believe what he had said was true, having seen many pieces of evidence to the contrary, he was beginning to doubt his own story and believe he had gone insane, when a strange person appeared at the hospital and tried to take him forcefully out of the hospital. The guy bound him to the stretcher, and killed a nurse who tried to interrupt him. At this point, Martine concluded he had been right after all, and he must have been involved in some kind of nefarious conspiracy. Fleeing from the killer guy, he decided to fight to take back his true identity.

Some may see this as a garden-variety thriller plot, and I don’t argue against them. There are certainly some unexpected twists toward the end, but they are not so unpredictable nor so shocking. After watching it, you might be feeling “I’ve seen many movies like this,” an opinion with which I would agree. Still, I like this movie because it’s full of so many beautiful scenes (or landscapes?). And Liam Neeson played his role well. Diane Kruger’s cute. These three factors---beautiful scenes, a seasoned hero, and a cute heroine---made this otherwise run-of-the-mill suspense thriller a worth-a-watch movie.