365 Days. 365 Films.

From the director of Orphan and House of Wax comes a comparable film, aptly named Unknown. Just as the title suggests, the film is relatively ignorant to every genre it tries to accompany. The film begins at an airport in Berlin where a man (Liam Neeson) and his wife (January Jones) have arrived for a conference. After arriving at the hotel, Neeson’s Dr Martin Harris realises he has left his briefcase behind and in his hurry, he winds up at the bottom of a river. Surviving the accident, Martin wakes up after a four day coma and can’t quite remember everything.

From stolen identities to undercover assassins, the writers couldn’t quite keep their eye on the ball and the film suffers the rookie mistakes involved in plot twists – after burying itself into a specific type of movie, the director struggles to convince the audience of the next twist. Begrudgingly accepting this haphazardly thrown in plot twist, it did make the film a little more exciting than identity theft, although not enough time of the film was dedicated to it. If it had been then this film would have been a much more enjoyable action flick as opposed to the mystery thriller theme it plays with, gets bored of, and moves on to the more exciting angle about half an hour before the end.
The direction is good although, like the plot, it swaps and changes in terms of the angle of the film. There are parts of it which seem to be seeking a higher status to the film than what the narrative will allow and Liam Neeson has certainly done better too. Although Neeson seems to play the same part in a lot of movies these days, his acting is passable but, again, it feels like he was trying to do a lot with a little.

The genre is Unknown, the number of plot holes is Unknown and some of the accents are Unknown. Just going to show that severe care has to be taken in which draft actually goes into production.