Unknown identity

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Movie
German title Unknown identity
Original title Unknown
Country of production France
Germany
United Kingdom
original language English , German
Publishing year 2011
length 114 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 12
Rod
Director Jaume Collet-Serra
script Oliver Butcher ,
Stephen Cornwell
production Joel Silver ,
Leonard Goldberg ,
Andrew Rona
music John Ottman ,
Alexander Rudd
camera Flavio Martínez Labiano
cut Timothy Alverson
occupation

Unknown Identity (original title unknown ) is an action - thriller from director Jaume Collet-Serra from the year 2011 based on the bestseller Hors de moi in 2003 by Didier Van Cauwelaert . Liam Neeson , Diane Kruger and January Jones play the leading roles in an international production filmed in Germany about an American scientist who is involved in the activities of a murder squad in Berlin . The film opened in North America on February 18, 2011 and had its international premiere at the 2011 Berlinale . The medium-sized production with a budget of $ 40 million by US standards ran in over 50 countries around the world and grossed over $ 136 million at the box office by June 2011.

action

The American biologist Dr. Martin Harris travels to Berlin with his wife Elizabeth to meet the German Nobel Prize winner Professor Bressler at a biotechnology congress . Upon arrival at the Hotel Adlon , he notices that his briefcase is missing. On the way back to the airport, his taxi crashed into the Spree in an accident . The taxi driver rescues him from the sinking vehicle and then disappears. After four days in a coma , Harris wakes up in the hospital with memory loss. Since he has no papers with him and the US embassy is closed for Thanksgiving , his identity cannot be established. A television report from the biotechnology conference reminds him of the purpose of his visit. He leaves the hospital to see his wife at the hotel. But she no longer seems to recognize him, and by her side is another man who also pretends to be Martin Harris and can prove his identity to the security forces who have been summoned.

Harris' friend, Professor Rodney Cole, who could identify him, cannot be reached by phone. Harris is now on his own in Berlin. He goes to Professor Bressler's laboratory, but the other Harris is already there and convinces Bressler of his identity on the basis of papers and family photos that show him with Elizabeth. Harris number one doubts his sanity, collapses, and is taken back to the clinic. Here he barely escapes an attack on his life, but his nurse Gretchen is murdered. He tracks down the taxi driver who saved him from the Spree. It is the Bosnian Gina, who lives illegally in Germany , who saves money to buy identity papers and start a new life. In Gina's apartment, the two are surprised and attacked by the killers Smith and Jones, but are able to kill Smith and escape Jones after a wild chase.

Through a tip that the murdered nurse had given him, Harris came to the private detective and former Stasi agent Ernst Jürgen, who helped him to uncover the connections. He finds out that the patron and sponsor of the upcoming congress, the controversial Arab Prince Shada, has already been attacked several times in the past. From this he concludes that Shada could also be the target of an assassination this time, for which an assassin as "Martin Harris" should be placed in his vicinity.

Harris and Gina watch Elizabeth and Martin Harris number two. Harris number one can watch Elizabeth when she visits an exhibition. After some hesitation, she finally admits that she recognizes him and reminds him of his forgotten briefcase that is still at the airport. Harris picks up the suitcase at the airport with Gina. A passport inside actually identifies him as Martin Harris, a professor at Langmore University. Gina and Harris then split up.

In the meantime, the private detective Jürgen receives a visit from Professor Rodney Cole. In the course of the conversation Jürgen suggests that he recognizes in Cole the representative of an independent organization of contract killers called Section 15, which he is rumored to be familiar with from his Stasi past and which is supposed to still exist. Before Cole can squeeze more information out of Jürgen, Jürgen kills himself with cyanide .

At the airport, Cole meets Harris number one. He only remembers Cole as a long-term, good friend. Cole can lure Harris to a van with which he, with Jones' help, kidnaps him into a parking garage. Here Cole confronts Harris with the facts: He was Cole's best hit man and was supposed to commit an attack on the conference with his partner. To do this, he invented the couple "Martin and Elizabeth Harris". Since he was canceled due to his accident, he was replaced by the second occupation. Due to the gaps in memory due to the accident, however, he has lost touch with reality and believes in his pseudo identity himself. Since the attempts to get him back into the team were unsuccessful, he should be killed. Suddenly Gina shows up with a stolen taxi, rams Jones and pushes the van including Cole over the barrier, so that he falls into the depths and dies. With Cole's opening, Harris now remembers that three months ago he was already in Berlin with Elizabeth under a different name to plant the bomb for the attack in the Hotel Adlon.

At a reception from Prince Shada at the Hotel Adlon, Elizabeth downloads secret data from Professor Bressler's notebook and activates the prepared bomb. Harris number one appears at the hotel and warns the security chief about the bomb that he himself placed there. The explosion should look like an assassination attempt on Shada. Now Harris realizes, however, that the real target of the attack is Professor Bressler. The Nobel Prize laureate wants to make his latest biotechnological invention, a type of grain that grows even under extreme climatic conditions, available to the world free of charge. But this would endanger the profits of the agribusiness and should therefore be eliminated. While the hotel is being vacated, Elizabeth dies while attempting to defuse the bomb when it explodes. In the ruins of the hotel there is a fight between the two Harris, in which number one kills his doppelganger.

Harris number one and Gina have obtained new papers and are leaving Berlin together. On the same day, Professor Bressler and his financier, Prince Shada, inform the world public about the newly grown grain in a press conference.

background

Unknown Identity was created as part of a joint venture between the German Studio Babelsberg AG and the US Dark Castle Entertainment . In addition, the British Horticus Ltd. and the French Studio Canal SA are involved as production companies. The budget was about $ 40 million, according to producer Andrew Rona. The film received 4.2 million euros in funding from the German Film Fund and 450,000 euros from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg . The distributors are Warner Bros. , Kinowelt for Germany and Elmo Movieworld for Austria. The script is based on the novel Hors de moi (Out of My Head) by Didier van Cauwelaert . Its location was moved from Paris to Berlin. Numerous German-speaking actors were given roles in the film.

Filming

Shooting on March 20, 2010 on the Oberbaum Bridge

The shooting took place from January to April 2010 under the working title Unknown White Male in Berlin, in the Babelsberg film studio ( Potsdam ) and at Leipzig / Halle Airport . In Berlin, filming took place in the Heckeshorn Lung Clinic , at the main train station , at Friedrichstrasse station , on Pariser Platz , on Oranienburger Strasse and in the Platz der Luftbrücke and Bülowstrasse subway stations . From March 8th to 12th, 2010 the recordings of a night chase with car stunts were made in Friedrichstraße . The fall of a taxi into the Spree was filmed on the Oberbaum Bridge on March 21, 2010 . Other locations were the Tresor Club and the entrance hall of the Potsdam Film and Television University , which is the lobby of Professor Bressler's (actually nonexistent) Berlin University. The film was shot for four days in the Hotel Adlon , which also bears this name in the film. 270 extras were used for an explosion scene in front of the hotel, and hired emergency vehicles from the Berlin police can be seen. A replica of the hotel lobby was built in the Marlene-Dietrich-Halle of the Babelsberg studio to film the destruction. For the underwater shots of the taxi falling into the Spree, the largest water tank for film work in Germany was built in the studios, with a depth of four meters and a capacity of 500,000 liters. The “Faces” exhibition shown in the film was set up by production designer Richard Bridgland with specially made pictures by the young Berlin photographer Isabel Kronenberger, then a student at the Lette Association's vocational school for design . The shooting for the scene took place in two Berlin museums. For the external presentation of the museum, the facade of the New National Gallery was filmed, while the pictures were presented in the Berlinische Galerie . The scene in which Gina kills Cole and Jones in the stolen taxi and Martin Harris learns his true identity was filmed in the Spandauertor building ruins in Haselhorst. Part of the building of the BMW plant in Berlin can be seen.

Publication and audience success

On the weekend after its theatrical release in North America on February 18, 2011, the film reached first place in the North American box office. For the international premiere it was invited to the competition program of the Berlinale 2011 , where it ran out of competition. The cinema release in Germany and Austria was on March 3, 2011.

Unknown Identity was shown in theaters in over 50 countries around the world and grossed more than $ 136 million at the box office by June 2011, including over $ 63 million in the USA and Canada. The film reached over 620,000 visitors in Germany.

Reviews

Kathrin Häger makes a mixed verdict in film-dienst : “The [...] action-packed approach of a 'Hollywood-esque' thriller to German sensitivities [...] works quite refreshingly as a genre film of dual identities and stars - but the flaw of predictability and the remain Holes in the plot as big as Berlin and the nasty simple message: 'You are what you do, not what you were.' ”The plot becomes“ an overloaded conglomeration of current hot spots. The 'Diva' Berlin as a place of action, filled with a cast of stars from both sides of the Atlantic, of course fits very well with a film that does not take its own story as seriously as the staging of its show values. "

Ekkehard Knörer writes: “At its most basic level, that of the all-enabling, but itself quite neutral plot (in short: here the plot is pure medium from which the film derives forms and constellations) Unknown is a through by Philip K. Dick as well Hitchcock inspired impersonation constellations of meandering thrillers. His script intelligence […] proves itself from the beginning: step by step the film asks, while others of its kind try to fool the viewer for their own progress, always exactly the questions that one as a viewer of the truly inexplicable things, the do yourself here, always poses. "

Cinema magazine dedicated the cover story of issue 3/2011 to the film and was enthusiastic: “[…] with the bare facts on paper, one could not have predicted that there was more to this film than the average thriller. Even the trailer [...] does not reveal that the fans of the genre are being served a special treat, a sophisticated piece of tension cinema that casts the viewer under its spell every second. Conclusion: A cleverly constructed, excellently played and technically flawless conspiracy thriller. Even the 'Bourne' trilogy does not come up against this. "

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Release certificate for Unknown Identity . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , February 2011 (PDF; test number: 126 678 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for Unknown Identity . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ a b Andrew Rona at the press conference during the Berlinale on February 18, 2011. See the video press conference on the film page of the Berlinale after 34 minutes. Retrieved March 4, 2011.
  4. ^ A b The Numbers: Unknown , accessed June 14, 2011
  5. ↑ Unknown Identity at Blickpunkt: Film , accessed on January 21, 2011
  6. ↑ Kerstin Decker: Hollywood flies to Leipzig again. In: LVZ-online . Retrieved January 19, 2011 .
  7. ↑ Lothar Heinke : Hollywood in Mitte - The star is the city. In: Der Tagesspiegel . March 8, 2010, accessed January 19, 2011 .
  8. ↑ Konstantin Marrach: Great cinema at the crash tree bridge. In: Berliner Zeitung . March 21, 2010, accessed May 11, 2016 .
  9. ↑ Konstantin Marrach: The Adlon is burning for filming. In: Berliner Zeitung . March 4, 2010, accessed January 19, 2011 .
  10. ↑ Water tank: Studio Babelsberg AG ( Memento of the original from May 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed February 21, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.studiobabelsberg.com
  11. ↑ Henrik Mortsiefer: Where Hollywood goes swimming. February 12, 2011, accessed February 21, 2011 .
  12. ^ Ingo Eisner: From Hennef to Hollywood. In: General-Anzeiger Bonn from April 4, 2011
  13. ↑ Exhibition Unknown Identity: Isabel Kronenberger ( Memento of the original from June 28, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed March 1, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.isabelkronenberger.com
  14. ↑ Production notes: Warner Bros. (PDF; 98 kB), accessed on March 1, 2011
  15. ↑ Thriller “Unknown Identity” in first place in the USA , dpa report from February 20, 2011
  16. ↑ Competition of the 61st Berlinale (PDF; 82 kB), accessed on January 18, 2011
  17. ↑ Box Office Mojo: Unknown: Foreign , accessed July 3, 2011
  18. ↑ Unknown Identity at Blickpunkt: Film , accessed July 3, 2011
  19. ↑ Kathrin Häger: Unknown Identity. In: film-dienst , accessed on May 11, 2016
  20. ↑ Ekkehard Knörer : Chorisch Vitruvisches: Unknown dissected Berlin In: Perlentaucher . February 18, 2011, accessed February 18, 2011.
  21. ↑ Unknown Identity on cinema.de, accessed on March 5, 2011