Who knew an actor’s mid-50s was a good time to start being an action hero?

In this movie (sort of a reverse Fugitive), he travels to Berlin with his wife in order to speak at a agri-bio conference where some rich good guys (including himself and a prince) are going to make a special kind of corn available for free to the world. Yay! (Except it’ll probably lead to High Fructose Corn Syrup.)

Anyway, right upon arriving, he realizes he’s left his briefcase at the airport and rushes back to get it. On the way to the airport, he ends up in a car accident, a coma, and awake four days later in a hospital with a fractured memory and no one who knows who he is. Not only does no one know who he is, when he tries to prove who he is, he can’t.

And thus is the mystery of Unknown.

The next couple hours are spent unraveling the riddle of his identity. This involves some pretty good car chases, some fisticuffs, and some intrigue hearkening back to the cold war.

Sure, we’ve seen it a thousand times before. But never with Liam Neeson! Erm, in Berlin. With January Jones. And, this doesn’t suck.

That is to say, the riddle of the story is resolved in about the only plausible way, after presenting a few awful alternatives that have been used in other movies.

It’s not great. It’s a fun little potboiler along the lines of Taken but less gripping somehow. Good supporting cast including Bruno “Hitler” Ganz, Frank “Nixon” Langella and January “Betty Draper” Jones.

The Boy liked it though he was instructed by one of his friends that if anyone should say it’s better than Taken he was to kick them in the crotch. Anyway, not for Mr. Neeson’s high-brow fans, who would probably be watching, I dunno, Next of Kin or The Dead Pool.