Blackout

While undeniably containing many similarities to Saw II and Reservoir Dogs, Unknown boasts a unique (if contrived) central idea that lacks the necessary anchoring in reality to make it believable. Five men, all of them battered to some degree, awake in an abandoned mine (or refinery) with no memory of who they are or how they got there. As the story unfolds, they discover that two of them are hostages, which means the other three are bad guys. Even worse, the bad guys' accomplices are returning from collecting the ransom money to put a hole in the hostage's heads.

It's an intriguing premise, and writer Matthew Waynee touches all bases while not quite managing to exploit the opportunity for suspense inherent in the plot. Despite its short length (85 minutes), the time doesn't pass that quickly, even though the film is never boring. Everyone is understandably stressed and shouts a lot and they're all generally unpleasant to one another, so we don't develop any particular attachment to their characters. Given this, and the fact that there are some glaring plot holes (these guys don't have wallets?) the film falls short of its potential by some distance.

The cast is surprisingly good for what looks like a low budget effort, and they all perform well, and the story will keep you watching to the end to find out just who is who but, ultimately, Waynee adds just one unnecessary twist too many, leaving the suspicion that he wants to show us how clever he is as much as he wants to tell us a story.

I usually am disappointed in psychological thrillers - typically the twist at the end never lives up to the hype. It was a wonderful surprise that this one failed to let me down at the end. Although the film is slow at times, there are numerous twists and turns so you don't have to wait until the end for all of the excitement.

Unknown is a great movie that keeps the viewer trying to stay one step ahead through the collective confusion. Caviezel and Peppers gave strong and engaging performances. Kinnear skillfully draws both dislike and sympathy. Stormare is a great character actor and perfectly cast for the role.

I agree with other viewers the lighting was dim and depressing but I would give a good guess that this was intentional. Certainly the movie would not have "felt" the same otherwise.

This movie is engaging in the first twenty or so minutes, with a good cast including famous celebrities (Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, James Caviesel) and some appearances from indie stars (Peter Stormare, Joe Pantilona, Jeremy Sisto, and Marke Boone Junior). The acting is pretty good and the camera work is OK as is the story, with enough twists and turns to probably entertain most viewers for the running time. It's not a bad movie but not a great one either, with it's story there is no moral to be learned and that's fine but i wish the director gave the movie more style since it's not a heavy drama, the camera wasn't very flashy almost bland and the scenes outside of the warehouse were poorly done. If only the movie took place all inside that warehouse and the if the director didn't try to make it so straight forward. overall i give this a B-, it's worth seeing but don't make a huge effort. Also don't listen to the ads saying that this has the same story style as Memento, because it doesn't. Rating: the film when i watched it was not rated, the movie contains many F words although not extreme, and the violence in this movie is toned down, yes there's some but not too bad.

saw it on Demand in IFC in Theatres

I saw "UNKNOWN" yesterday in a midnight special screening and it was surprisingly good! In deed, this one is a real beauty among so many mystery, psychological thrillers hitting the cinemas in the last years.

This movie is a little bit of "SAW", a little bit of "IDENTITY", a little bit of "RESERVOIR DOGS" spiced with some tiny little pieces of "CUBE" - so far, so good and so anticipating. BUT: in many movies of this kind there is a story with some huge holes in the plot and a final twist at the end which may be unexpected and surprising - but after some minutes you feel a little bit strange about it because the final twist being of some strange coincidence.

"UNKNOWN" is better: the only coincidence you will have to swallow is right in the beginning of the movie, that there is a chemical gas which is strong enough to wipe out the complete memory of five people (including their whole identity!) for some hours, but fails to kill one of them although "death" being one of its side effects.

Under this premise the rest of the story is fully logical and surprisingly clever. And it makes the best out of the fact, that in many scenes the audience is better informed about the real identity of the characters than the characters themselves.

And the end is just stunning: when the final credits hit the screen you have seen many final twists and you know everything about what was going on in the chemical factory, but you do not know all about the motive force of any character. In fact, 24 hours after seeing this movie I still try to find out what is my personal opinion about Jean Jacket and his role in this game.

...and a movie which is worth to think about more than 10 minutes is always worth a watch. Enjoy this ride!!!

Maybe the critic who wrote (something like) '...written by the smartest kid in film school...' was right--you really need to pay attention to understand the game, the rules and the players.

And just when you believe you've figured it out, yikes, there are more twists.

Solid performances by all players, every one believable in their loss-of-memory-ness.

Several characters transformed with nice arcs that cross, mesh, repel and attract.

Smart clues dropped unexpectedly.

Plus, released to cable partners of IFC (at least in the NYC, NJ and Conn area) and is also available now with video-on-demand service. This makes this nice little film available to many, many more viewers, because the number of theatres listed across the US playing it numbers about one dozen.