New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

A good villain is a terrible thing to waste

Okay, I’m going to leap straight into spoilers here, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know how silly Unknown really is.

About two-thirds of the way through the movie, we learn from Frank Langella, who shows up saying that he is an old friend of Martin’s but who is really the head of an elite group of assassins, that Martin Harris is actually not a real person, but a persona that Neeson’s created in order to infiltrate the conference he was meant to attend and plant a bomb that would kill the inventor of a new kind of super-corn that could end world hunger. (The team of assassins having apparently been hired by the nefarious agents of Big Corn, which sounds like the worst name for an evil cadre of industrialists or ‘70s era pimp ever.) The concussion that “Martin” sustained in his accident caused him to confuse his cover for his real life, which at least explains why a botanist has great fighting and mad defensive driving skills, and meant that the assassins had to bring in a replacement to complete Martin’s mission.

This is all revealed in what proves to be Langella’s third and final scene in the movie, after which he is killed off rather weakly when Gina uses a stolen taxi to ram his van off the third story of a car park. The reason why this is such a major problem for the film is that Langella manages to fill more menace and danger into his five minutes of screen time than any of the other bad guys in the film manage with four or five times that, despite at no point actually doing anything threatening. He never uses a gun, he never fights anyone, all he does is stand and talk in that half-soothing, half-terrifying way that he does. He’s exactly what the film had been missing up until that point, and the filmmakers decide that the logical thing to do with the one palpable threat in the whole film is shove him off a tall building 20 minutes from the end. Considering that leaves the film with January Jones as the main antagonist, and considering that she has a hard enough time acting like a human, let alone one with duplicitous ends, it leaves the final act of the film decidedly lacking in any real interest. Then again, the film even does her a disservice by having her die when she fails to deactivate a bomb she helped set up in the first place. There’s dispensing justice to the bad guys in a satisfactory manner, then there’s just killing them so you don’t have to write too many scenes for them.

Continued:       1       2