"Unknown" (2006) - Movie Review

The suspense in a film which puts the pieces in the puzzle is any time a bonus to an already good film. Arriving to that point is the important thing rather than unknotting few dozens of clues near the end. This is what happens in “Unknown” a supposedly good premise failing on this note. It had some good casts of Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinear, Barry Pepper and Joe Pantoliano. It is not nail biting thriller or has twisted mind games but a straight lined suspense film with the twists straighter than the story itself.

An abandoned warehouse/industrial plant has entities with lost memory due to some gas leakage. They do not remember their name, roles or why in the hell they are out there. With some immediate clues we come to know that two of them are hostages while three others are kidnappers. They are Greg Kinear, Barry Pepper, Jim Caviezel, Joe Pantoliano tied to a chair and Jeremy Sisto who is shot and handcuffed. It is neither a crooked psychopathic game as in “Saw” nor a psychological trap/mind game in “Mind hunters”.

The film soon becomes a chewing which has lost its sweet taste and we are chewing it for the heck of it. Mainly the blandness in the situation is the reason of the memory loss itself. Of course there are flashes of relapsing cuts for each one looking in the mirror but the relapse are the clues which are given only to know the immediate next scene. The film does not focus on the inside alone; it takes us to the Eliza Coles (Bridget Moynahan) who is the wife of kidnapped Coles (any one of them in the warehouse) working with the cops. So this gives us a hint by two methods. One that there is character with a known actor which should accumulate to something to the story apart from sobbing and secondly they want to feed some more details to cover bases.

The concept of mind games among individuals with some one snitching has been successfully blasted in “Reservoir Dogs”. It is an exact replica of it minus witty, scary and cold dialogues of Quentin Tarantino. There is no unique personality to make it of that kind. There is an unknown trust which happens between the character of Caviezel and Pepper just on the basis that they woke up before any of them. Since we do not know anything about these people, our care in their escape is next to nothing. But to reveal everything about them gives out the story, so basically they dug their own grave.

There are two cops Detective James Curtis (Chris Mulkey) and Detetive Anderson (Clayne Crawford) who exist for the reason for the progress in the case and they cannot make it tasteless than this. The whole outside story did not make sense when the end is revealed. I would have been more intrigued to see these unknown characters develop from nothing, a fresh start in a situation to survive. But wait; have we not seen that in “The Bourne Identity” and its further films? It does sound a great pitch to give it in a single line and get it green lit without problems.

When a character with conscience is pushed into killing couple of people and when he/she is about to shoot them, if the camera shows some other person hearing the gunshots, it means only one thing, take your guess. “Unknown” does not have much of the regular thriller cliché routines but it does not have any other thing either to make it a complete film. I was not bored but neither was I excited.