Five wounded, beaten up and dazzled guys come back to their senses in a deserted warehouse, or an old mothballed power station.
The first thing they discover is the fact that, no matter what they do, they can’t get out unless someone opens the door from the outside. They are sealed shut.
For the rest of this claustrophobic, dark and merciless film, the five try to find out who they are. Three have kidnapped the other two but we do not know who is whom because a certain gas that escaped from its canister during the scuffle put them all to sleep and caused them to lose their memory.
As memory shards and sequences eventually start to flash back, they start to regain parts of their lost memories and they start to put together the broken narrative. That’s also how the tension starts to build up by mutual accusations and finger-pointing and boiling knee-jerk impulses to settle the score.
Parallel to this is the second story of the kidnappers getting the ransom payment and returning to the warehouse either to release or kill the hostages.
At the end we of course have a big bloodbath a la Tarrantino but still one hidden link between one of the chief bad guys and the wife of the kidnapped good guy remains hidden to all the players but is revealed to us, the audience. I really liked that sophisticated touch that earns the film its name, “Unknown.”
There are true bona fide stars in Hollywood who do not even need a last name (Jack, Meryl, Tom, Warren, Clint, Morgan, Denzel, Julia, etc.).
And there are those second-tier stars that we have all watched in dozens of great movies but whose names we cannot recall immediately.
This film is populated by the best of such second-tier stars — Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Joe Pantoliano, Bridget Moynahan, Jeremy Sisto, Peter Stormare, Clayne Crawford, and Barry Pepper.
If you have seen the Reservoir Dogs and Memento, you can ignore this made-for-TV flick and you won’t be missing much except for the very last scene in which the director allows us to catch a delicious glimpse of the “story hidden inside a story.”