"Unknown" - 2011

An American emerges from a coma in Europe to find his life doesn't add up. He then sets out to construct a picture of himself using the ill-fitting pieces presented to him. Along the way he picks up a wandering Euro-gal who, though reluctant to help anyone, (she's had a hard life you see), nevertheless goes to extraordinary lengths to help him. What they discover sets them on a collision course with powers beyond their imagination and causes him to renounce his pre-coma life in its entirety.

You could lift that paragraph and use it to summarize "The Bourne Identity" without changing a word. The stories are so similar you could probably replace scenes from "Unknown" with scenes from The Bourne Identity and not change the movie at all. Check that. You'd have a better movie if you did that because TBI was a complete (if somewhat far fetched) movie. Unknown relies way too heavily in its second half on characters standing still and explaining everything the film makers couldn't figure out how to explain using moving pictures. It's painful to watch. In theory I don't mind a film scamming on another films storyline. It's done all the time and when it's done well I'm able to better appreciate aspects of the original movie I may have missed. But in this case the only thing that's accomplished by Unknown's glumming onto TBI's narrative is a no-holds-barred demonstration of the difference between film makers who know what they're doing and those that don't. 

Director Jaume Collet-Serra is positioning himself perfectly for a career in B-movies, territory the screenwriters know only too well and where, hopefully, they'll stay until they learn their craft. The chase sequences are lame in the extreme when compared to their Bourne brethren. The supporting characters are little more than cardboard cutouts whose mouths move and all that but whose real purpose is to fill space within the boundaries of the screen and look 'realistic' without behaving or speaking thus. The special effects look like they paid about $20 for them. Really. I don't know exactly what was said by the studio types who okayed these visual travesties, but I have an idea: "Sure it looks like crap. But it's Liam people are coming to see. Just hit render and get on with it!"

I really don't want to spend any more of my one and only life thinking or writing about this film so I'm not going to. Let's just say that at the end of the reel Unknown is a complete waste of time and money. I'll be watching for the release date of the sequel so I can plan on doing something else that night.