Come Back, Liam, We Miss You

Where have you gone, Liam Neeson, Liam Neeson? With your deep-set, blazing silver-blue eyes and your rugged good looks? Your gravelly voice tempered by soft, rolling Irish tones? We loved you for your self-effacing heroism as Oskar Schindler and marveled at your gentle turn as the widowed father in “Love Actually.” Do you really want to trade all that in for the chance to say — no, growl — lines like “I haven’t forgotten how to kill you, [expletive]!”? It’s not as if “Unknown” is a half-bad Hollywood thriller, but neither is it half-good. More like half-baked: a piece of derivative, desultory filmmaking if ever there was one. Why, it even purloins shamelessly from your own previous big-budget thriller, “Taken,” not to mention a truckload of others such as Harrison Ford’s 1988 vehicle “Frantic,” Sandra Bullock’s far more entertaining “The Net,” and most blatantly the long-running “Bourne” series. Why cast your lot with an “unknown,” or at least unproven, director (Jaume Collet-Serra) in a film that it took a small army of writers to concoct? No wonder you could drive a semi through the holes in the plot, which involves you waking up in Berlin from a post-car-wreck coma with a shaky memory of who you are and finding out that Aidan Quinn is “you” and has stolen your wife (January Jones), who doesn’t seem to know who “you” are, either.  And what’s Aidan doing slumming his way through another film? That guy needs to get his acting life together, too, but we’ll save that for another day. Granted, you play this role with a bit of a lighter touch than you did the similar part in “Taken,” which was almost unbearable to watch, but it’s still not much fun to see you beaten, kidnapped, drugged, angry, and desperate; then team up with the obligatory exotic foreign babe (Diane Kruger) and become the avenging angel. Who wants to pay $9.50 for that? You have Frank Langella (as a master assassin) and especially the plucky veteran German actor Bruno Ganz (as an ex-Stasi private eye) to thank for goosing up the movie when they’re on screen. Those old pros know when they’re in hot water, but they sure know how to swim. You, on the other hand, are at the peak of your career. You’re standing where two roads diverge. One path, that of the “action hero,” has been blazed for you by the likes of Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson, whose faces might as well be frozen into permanent scowls, and who seem determined to out-martyr each other. Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road. Take the high road, Liam. We’ll love you for it. P.S. Thank your writing and directing team for at least not making the stock “Arab” character the villain for a change. P.P.S. Tell your moviemaking team that if I have to see one more movie depiction of a building being blown up in an eerie visual reference to some real historical event (in this case, Mumbai), I’m going to boycott the movies. Thanks. “Unknown” is rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of violence and action (including the aforementioned, gratuitous bombing), and brief sexual content.  It is playing at the Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and elsewhere in the region.