Unknown

Jaume Collet-Serra’s film follows Martin Harris, a researcher in Berlin for a biotech summit who wakes from a crash to find someone else using his identity. Even his wife does not know him. The screenplay comes from Didier van Cauwelaert’s novel Hors de moi, published by Albin Michel on 9 April 2003, in English Out of My Head. Collet-Serra was living in Berlin while he made it and says showing the city as it is mattered to him; there are things in the film only Berliners notice. Shooting used real locations in early February 2010: the taxi goes off the Oberbaum bridge into the Spree, interiors came from the Hotel Adlon, Friedrichstrasse closed for several nights for the car chase. Studio Babelsberg is among the producers and German public film funds put in 4.65 million euros. The best scene is not a chase: Jürgen, the former Stasi investigator played by Bruno Ganz, sizing up Frank Langella’s Western operative across a table. These two old men carry the identity question more than Neeson’s running. A good fit if you want a bureaucratic thriller where identity is proved by a badge, a hotel record and someone else’s word, and two Cold War leftovers steal it. Not for you if you expect the first half to hold up once the explanation arrives.