In Revue: Nice Unknowin’ Ya!

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

Liam Neeson loses himself in Unknown. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

So if you’re a regular reader of In Revue (and hey, thanks!), you’d probably think it’d be a cold day in hell when we advocate some tweeny sci-fi romance movie. Well bundle up, friends. Because today is that day. And better yet, the new Liam Neeson movie is really good. And somebody killed somebody in small town Ontario. Don’t you want to know who? We’ll get the corn popping.

When Liam Neeson cut a dapper, throat-punching swath across the Parisian underworld in Pierre Morel’s outstanding Taken, he blasted open a space for himself as a new kind of action hero. Part Bourne-modeled superspy, part grimacing Bronsonian righter of wrongs with lethal talents and don’t-give-a-shit ‘tude to spare, Neeson embraced every inch of his hulking six-foot-plus frame in what became one of the best action films of the last decade. So it makes sense to double-down on Taken’s success, plunking its star back in a gorgeous European capital (Berlin, this time around) and tasking him with lurching up the ladder of another multifarious conspiracy. And if anyone could be charged with capably replicating the volatile je ne sais quois of Taken with persuasive schlock and abandon, it’d be Jaume Collet-Serra, director of credible cheap thrillers House of Wax (2005) and Orphan (2009).
In Unknown, Neeson plays big shot scientist Martin Harris, abroad with his wife (January Jones) for a biotechnology conference. After his cab veers off a bridge, Harris suffers a nasty bump on his brainy noggin and wakes up four days later in a German hospital with no identification and only vague impressions of how he got there. (Reason to move to Germany number one: tourists with no ID receive four-day hospital stays and batteries of tests, administered by cartoonishly helpful medical professionals, all on the house.) When he eventually makes his way back to the hotel he remembers he had a reservation at, he finds he’s been replaced by a double (Aidan Quinn) who, though not nearly as handsome, can recite the details of Martin Harris’s personal life down to the teeniest father-son reminiscence. Worse yet, his wife acts all aloof, like she has no idea who he is. And without a passport to corroborate his identity, he is, by all accounts, unknown.
Teaming up with an expat cabbie played by Diane Kruger (reason to move to Germany numbers two and three: women as gorgeous as Diane Kruger drive cabs; all cabs are Mercedes-issue) and a former East German secret service officer (Bruno Ganz, in an outstanding supporting turn), Harris’s quest to prove his identity takes him all the way to the tippy-top of a global conspiracy (headed, of course, by Frank Langella).
Unknown is ripping, and beautifully shot, fun. It lacks the frantic kill-a-minute pacing of Taken, and Collet-Serra fails to imbue the film’s action set pieces with sufficient whizz-bang panache, excepting the inevitable final showdown between the two Martins. But the narrative, and the resilient performances (Neeson, Kruger, Ganz, Langella, everyone but January Jones, really) that shove it along, just about manage to ballast the conservative kill count.
Reason to move to Germany number four: they shot Unknown there, guy.
Unknown opens Friday, February 18 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

There’s trouble brewing in Anywhere, Ontario. Toronto filmmaker Ed Gass-Donnelly moves from the urban bedlam of his previous film, the Hogtown-set This Beautiful City and into a sleepy Ontario Mennonite burg. Peter Stormare (Fargo,TV’s Prison Break) plays a broad-shouldered sheriff trying to drown his violent past in holy water and the promise of religious redemption. When a young woman turns up murdered, the ensuing complications serve to test his mettle.
As Walter, Stormare is intense, effortlessly apprehending the character of a born-again goon suffering to drown his baser, more violent, impulses. In the requisite role of level-headed deputy, Aaron Poole also shines. Murder Songs flirts with various murder-mystery genre conventions: the protagonist with a dark past of his own, the local constabulary butting heads with external authorities (in this case, the OPP), and so on. But it’s to Gass-Donnelly’s credit that the film doesn’t play out like a Canadian aping of CSI. The film is more allegory of violence and redemption than police procedural, intermittingly projecting an eerie gravity resembling what it might feel like to hear Cormac McCarthy give a reading in a rundown Coffee Time somewhere off Highway 8. Call it Southern Ontario gothic.
The film’s sense of its own severity hampers it in places. With explicitly Biblical inter-titles embossed across vast bucolic landscapes, and a thumping gospel soundtrack by Bruce Peninsula that begs to be called “haunting,” the film is overloaded, frequently veering into heavy-handedness. Perhaps all the talk of death, rebirth, and the Lord Jesus Christ Almighty isn’t the kind of stuff fit for a lighter touch. But the result is a film that’s all fire and brimstone, and often as hard to swallow as the most needlessly apocalyptic, graceless church sermon.
Small Town Murder Songs opens Friday, February 18 for a limited release at The Royal Cinema (608 College Street). Click here for showtimes.

For a movie that is essentially a Twilight rip-off, or is at the very least being pitched into the market of teens and tweens bloodthirsty for some harmless unearthly romance, I Am Number Four is pleasantly refreshing. And thoroughly entertaining.
Based on the young adult novels by Pittacus Lore (the suitably dorky pen name of Jobie Hughes and A Million Little Pieces author James Frey), I Am Number Four swaps out the voguish vampires and werewolves for races of warring extra-terrestrials. English model Alex Pettyfer plays John Smith, a.k.a. Number Four, one of nine infant aliens sent to Earth after their home planet was decimated by a malicious, Bic-bald race of space invaders called the Mogadorians. Under the ever-watchful eye of his mentor and protector Henri (the always excellent Timothy Olyphant), John sets down in Paradise, Ohio, the postcard picture of the All American Everytown™.
In flagrant disregard of Henri’s instructions to lay low (and because sitting around the house looking effortlessly handsome all day wouldn’t make for much of a movie), John enrols in the local high school, where he runs afoul of the Alpha Jock (Jake Abel), befriends the UFO Dweeb (Callan McAuliffe), develops a crush on the Loner-Artist-But-Still-Conventionally-Attractive-Babe (Dianna Agron), and generally interfaces with all the other John Hughesian high school stereotypes. In keeping with the Superman-style, alien-out-of-water narrative, he begins developing superpowers just as a gang of especially nasty Mogadorians closes in on his location.
I Am Number Four may seem a bit stock. But so what? It’s a movie for teenagers (which, nowadays, means nine year olds). In light of this, the film is surprisingly teenaged. There are intimations of real violence with real consequences beyond a few bumps, scrapes, and laser burns. And even the subplot about said Alpha Jock exerting his cool guy influence over his ex-girlfriend (the Artist Babe) is fairly mature. Best of all, Caruso (Eagle Eye, Disturbia) nails the action sequences, pulling off the exhilarating CGI sci-fi monsters and photon cannon shootouts with confidence and conviction (it probably helped that the film was backed by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Pictures and Michael Bay’s Bay Films). Part The X Files, Smallville, and Sixteen Candles, I Am Number Four is the best yet of a slew of otherwise forgettable films hoping to raise its own legion of squawking tinfoil hatted Twi-hard equivalents.
I Am Number Four opens Friday, February 18 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.