B Movie, For "Bourne"

In "Unknown," Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) thinks his identity has been stolen. "Unknown" is stolen by a charming pixie of a former agent of the East German Stasi, Ernst Jurgen, played by veteran German actor Bruno Ganz. Jurgen is working as a private investigator in Berlin. The movie meanders a bit until he and Harris meet, whereupon Jurgen livens things up by asking the same plotting questions we've been asking. "It used to be what I was known for," he says with a smile. "The details."

Harris, an American academic, and his icy wife, Elizabeth (January Jones), had arrived four days before for a biotech conference. On his way back to the airport to retrieve his briefcase, his taxi accidentally plunges into a river. By the time he recovers, Elizabeth has hooked up with another Martin Harris back at the conference, and they pretend they've never seen him before.

Once you know the whole story, you'll think again about the off-key interactions between Martin and Elizabeth in the first five carefully constructed minutes. This will tax your memory. The accident taxes (and alters) Harris's. I even forgot, at least for two hours, the unlikeliness of a sympathetic Stasi agent. "We all forget," says Jurgen. "We forgot the Nazis, and now we're forgetting 40 years of communism."

Director Jaume Collet-Serra obviously hasn't forgotten the Bourne movies, on whose conventions "Unknown" relies especially for its fight and chase scenes as well blurry flashbacks of prior capers. Harris's alliance with the taxi driver who saves his life, played by Diane Kruger, operates the same way as Matt Damon's with his costar, Franka Potente, in the first of the epic trilogy.

Overall the movie's too Bourne-again for five stars. It falls apart at the end when a villain insists on trying to disarm a bomb so the explosion won't implicate her and then knocks a conspicuous hole in a hotel suite wall to get at it. It's implied that boring old agribusiness, not ideology, is behind all the bloody mayhem. In a startling scene where Jurgen and an American counterpart (not Nixon, but he played him in the movies) enfold one another in what is simultaneously a death grip and friendly hug, we're reminded again that the Cold War is long gone and yet sometimes, at least by storytellers, lamented.

Join the CIA And Get A Clue

What would a father do to save his daughter? What would a spy do to prevent a terrorist attack? While the second question doesn't come up in "Taken," it was the first thing I thought of watching retired CIA agent Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) torture and kill the Albanian flesh merchant who had kidnapped his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). Bryan even shoots a perfectly innocent woman in the arm to get the attention of her husband, a corrupt French police official who may have information about Kim. "It's a flesh wound," he says reassuringly as she writhes in agony on the dining room floor. I lost track of the number of people Bryan killed on the way to saving his daughter. It's movie magic and manipulation, I realize, but as a father, I was rooting for him all the way. I imagine a majority of members of the Supreme Court would have been as well. I'm glad movie audiences don't rule on the legality of torture and rendition.

Neeson's character has quit the CIA to be a more attentive father to 17-year-old Kim, who colludes with her mother Leonore (Famke Janssen) to trick him into permitting her to accompany a friend to Paris, where she and a friend secretly plan to follow U2 on their European tour. This is egregious; 17-year-olds don't much like U2, in my experience. The girls are kidnapped on their first afternoon. What is it with these movies about how dangerous Europe is for American teenagers? While I've never been able to watch it all the way through, "Hostel" promoted the same view. In the case of "Taken," the bad guys are Albanian and French. There's also an old-fashioned perverted Arab sheik, plus a Paris-based American flesh merchant who plays the role of protecting the filmmakers from the charge that they're picking on foreigners. Still, in "Taken," only America is safe. Highly capable CIA agents know how dangerous and corrupt the world really is. Everyone else, especially women, is clueless.