Unknown: A Rose by Any Other Name...

Unknown, starring Liam Neeson, is like The Sixth Sense in that it hangs entirely upon a surprise revelation. If the twist is convincing to you, you'll probably like the movie. It wasn't for me. I'm always bothered by amnesia stories where people forget their name and just everything else about themselves, except how to hack computers, jimmy locked doors, and perform maiming roundhouse kicks.

The story is a whodunnit involving lost identity, and for most of the film we're wondering what the bad guys have on Neeson's wife so that she goes along with the apparent charade of not knowing Neeson and being married instead to Aiden Quinn, who goes by Neeson's same name. (Of course we're never informed why the masterminds behind the whole deal went to the effort of creating two identical actors, but leave that aside.)

My political gripe with the film is a sequence which is, I believe, the first use of the now preferred liberal moniker: progressive. An assassination attempt against a scientist who has developed a revolutionary corn strain, is of course, the result of nefarious corporate espionage. (Why they don't just steal the corn recipe rather than kill the inventor is beyond me.) The movie describes the scientist as a progressive who just wants to give the new strain to the world at no cost, which will, of course, wipe out world hunger.

This simple assertion--that people starve because there is inadequate food--is utterly unsupportable. People starve because their governments are corrupt. Period. And U.S. foreign aid in the billions hasn't eradicated hunger in sub-Saharan Africa because these cultures are frankly toxic. In other, harsh words: people get the government they allow to rule over them.

But the arrested adolescent progressives still believe that the simple act of inventing a new food will actually solve this perennial problem. And when it doesn't, do they reexamine their premises? No, because it's not results that matter to liberals/progressives, it's intent.

But my favorite part is the Saudi prince who is the financier of the new corn strain. He's willing to give the corn away because he, too, is a progressive. Show me one Saudi who ever gave anything away and I might believe this.

To sum up: Unknown is a mildly clever identity actioner with two frankly unbelievable characters (and, surprisingly, neither of them is Neeson): a scientist and a Saudi prince who both labor at great cost of time and money to develop a new corn strain and then decide to give it away for free. And Neeson et al. are the corporate assassins who want to interfere with this nobility. Of course, Neeson, who finally recovers his memory in the last act (though not his former values as a paid assassin), now struggles to expose the evildoers and prevent the assassination. Which, of course, he does.

This movie should have been billed as science fiction.