Film review: Unknown

LIAM Neeson forgets he was in Taken for far too much of this dreary Bourne rip-off about an apparently mild-mannered doctor embroiled in an identity-theft conspiracy after a car crash leaves him sans memory.

Stuck in a city he doesn't know (Berlin) with a wife who won't confirm his existence, it's roughly 90 minutes before he adopts the leather-jacketed dad-chic look that served him so well in that earlier slice of Luc Besson-produced Eurotrash and starts engaging in close-quarter, head-crunching carnage. Before that we're treated to far too much tedious plot-twisting nonsense as he takes up with a hottie cab driver (Diane Kruger) and an ex-Stasi agent (Bruno Ganz) to find out why nobody will acknowledge that he's Dr Martin Harris, renowned botanist, in town with his impossibly glamorous, unambiguously deceitful wife (Mad Men's January Jones) for a biotech conference on corn production.

It's not just that the premise hinges on a lost briefcase, or that Neeson's performance never seems to emerge from the coma that initially debilitates his character, it's that the film, directed by Spanish genre hack Jaume Collet-Serra, seems to have confused itself with a sedate character piece when the premise demands relentless brain-off fun.