Much like Christopher Walken, Liam Neeson seems to have carved himself a second career as a character actor. While Walken is now the go-to eccentric, Neeson has of late been mostly limited to the role of the family man who's transformed into a killing machine. Kind of like Bruce Willis, but less schlubby and more skilled. The runaway success of Taken proved that Neeson could so convincingly play the combination of an ordinary middle class schmoe and an unstoppable, brilliant black ops agent that he may be pigeonholed into that character forever. He appears to be doing much the same thing in the upcoming The Grey (and in Taken 2), and that's what he does in Jaume Collet-Serra's Unknown.
Though the movie has its flaws, no one does this sort of thing better than Neeson. He plays Martin Harris, a college professor visiting Berlin with his wife (January Jones). After a car accident leaves him in a coma for 4 days, he awakens to find that no one recognizes him. He finds his wife with another Martin Harris (Aidan Quinn), and all evidence seems to implicate him as the impostor.
Since the movie is not supernatural, there is naturally an explanation for everything, which turns out to be more predictable and less compelling than it fancies itself. But Collet-Serra, who directed the underrated remake of House of Wax as well as the top-notch horror flick Orphan, keeps things clipping along briskly, and even finds time for two excellent supporting performances from Bruno Ganz and Frank Langella, each playing a key character who may not be as he seems. Diane Kruger is also steadfast as always as a cab driver who becomes Martin's lone confidante.
At the center of it all is Neeson, who takes a virtually unplayable role and makes it believable. Faced with a seemingly otherworldly situation, he always behaves the way a human being would. Similar to his performance in Taken, he plays a character that's forced to do things that would make Superman queasy, and makes us believe that a normal guy could do them.
Gentlemen Broncos, the much-maligned most recent feature from Napoleon Dynamite creator Jared Hess, turns out to be a wickedly funny character movie. Like Napoleon, it isn't quite realism, but realism plus: its characters are perfectly normal, with just a hint of exaggeration. It's centered around a young writers' camp, at which a homeschooled boy (Michael Anganaro) turns in his own fantasy novel ("Yeast Wars: The Bronco Years") to his favorite novelist (Jemaine Clement, fantastic). Clement, a has-been with writer's block, steals the book and rewrites it as his own.
Hess populates the film with fascinatingly weird people, from Jennifer Coolidge's oddball hippie mom to Hector Jimenez as an off-putting student filmmaker who wants to shoot Anganaro's novel. Anganaro is likable as the taciturn hero, and Sam Rockwell appears in two hilariously polarized visualizations of "Yeast Wars": first Anganaro's, then Clement's.
By far the most bizarre film I've seen in a long while is Rubber, about a spare tire that kills people. The premise is irresistible, and the introduction is perfect: we see the tire awaken and learn to roll, then in full Nietzschean fashion, it discovers it can kill and so it does. This would have been enough, but director Quentin Dupieux insists on weighing the film down in more meta than it needs. He throws in a framing device about a captive audience watching the murders from a hillside, hammering into us the point that there will always be violence in entertainment as long as people are watching... yawn. If Rubber had just committed to its silly premise, and been less hamfisted about its symbolism, it might have been a nice smarter-than-average horror flick.
10. Playroom (1990): Jan. 15
11. Caddyshack II (1988): Jan. 15
12. Unknown (2011): Jan. 16
13. Carnage (2011): Jan. 16
14. Rubber (2010): Jan. 17
15. Gentlemen Broncos (2009): Jan. 17
16. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009): Jan. 19
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