Oscar Schindler Does Rambo

58-year-old Liam Neeson has pulled off an unlikely late-life career shift. First, with 2008's Taken, Neeson played a CIA badass on a rampage in Paris trying to rescue a kidnapped daughter and dispatching countless bad guys along the way. With the release of Unknown, Neeson plays yet another karate-chopping, car-chase-driving urban warrior in a European capital (this time Berlin). There must be some pent up demand for AARP action heroes, because both films have been successful.

I liked Taken. It offers an emotionally satisfying revenge tale of a parent's effort to save a child from sexual slavery while meting out justice to her assailants and other assorted co-conspirators. Yes, it was wildly implausible and endlessly manipulative, but it worked in precisely the way it was supposed to.

Unknown is quite different in many ways. There is no parental anguish fueling our hero's quest. This time, the story is fueled by an old-fashioned Hitchcockian mystery. Neeson plays Martin Harris, a biologist who arrives in Berlin with his wife (Mad Men's January Jones) intending to present a paper at a conference. When they arrive at the hotel, Neeson's Harris realizes that he left one of his bags at the airport, and without saying anything to January Jones, he hails a cab to take him back to the airport. However, along the way, the cab is in a terrible accident and Neeson barely survives only due to the heroism of the cab driver, a suspiciously attractive Diane Kruger. Neeson is in a coma for 4 days and when he recovers consciousness the real mystery begins. Why has his wife not come to see him? More importantly, when  he returns to the hotel to find her, why does she claim she doesn't know him, and why does another man step forward claiming to be the REAL Martin Harris?

Neeson is understandably bewildered by this turn of events. To help him figure it out, he seeks the help of Kruger and an ex-member of the East German secret police turned private dick wonderfully played by Bruno Ganz. The rest of the film simply plays out this mystery. While I was watching it, I kept running through my mind all of the possible rational explanations for Harris's predicament. Is the wife in on it or is she under duress? And if she is in on it, what exactly is the "it" she is in on? As the East German private eye aptly points out, how can a conspiracy depend on a purely accidental, and thus unpredictable, car wreck?

About three-quarters of the way through the film, all is explained. Whether or not you find this explanation satisfying will determine how you respond to the film. I bought it. What I found particularly ingenious about the explanation is that I was completely surprised by it, and it also accounted for several minor events that had previously seemed quite implausible, but now made perfect sense. On the other hand, if you see the big reveal coming before it arrives, or if you just find it too clever by half, you probably won't care for the film. I enjoyed it.