February 18, 2011
IT'S IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO AT LEAST NOD TO THE VISUAL STYLE OF "INCEPTION"...:
"Unknown": The thriller "Inception" wishes it could be: Pick of the week: Liam Neeson and January Jones star in the mind-bending Berlin-set thriller, "Unknown" (Andrew O'Hehir, 2/18/11, Salon)
What do you get when you combine an A-minus cast that seems almost randomly assembled; an identity-loss plot that Mixmasters bits of "Inception," "Memento," "Salt" and perhaps a half-dozen other movies; wintry Berlin locations; and a little-known Spanish director who is arguably most famous for making a horror film with Paris Hilton? To my enormous surprise, what you get in "Unknown" is a stylish and muscular thriller with some nifty twists and turns, a wicked sense of humor, several terrific performances and not one or even two but three of the best car chases in recent action-flick history. All of which, I guess, illustrates William Goldman's famous maxim of the movie business, which can equally be applied to the world in general: Nobody knows anything.My task here is to convince you that "Unknown" is pretty damn good without totally overselling a film that admittedly mashes up totally familiar ingredients: a good-looking guy, an icy blonde, a missing briefcase, a car accident, a faintly sinister European city and some bad guys in a black SUV. This is a studio thriller released in February, people, not the second coming of Hitchcock. Still, keep your expectations reasonable and director Jaume Collet-Serra -- undaunted by the presence of the 2005 "House of Wax" remake on his résumé -- will exceed them, delivering an exciting and unjaded entertainment with tremendous atmosphere, one that will keep you guessing almost to the final frame.
...but did any literate viewer not know the plot twist as soon as they saw Leo's dreidel?
