The story: Martin (Liam Neeson) and Liz Harris (January Jones) arrive in Berlin and go to their hotel. He forgot an important suitcase at the airport so he takes another taxi and goes back. There’s an accident, the taxi ends up in the river. The driver Gina (Diane Kruger) manages to save his life and then flees the scene because she’s an illegal immigrant. He wakes up four days later at a hospital. He had no documents on him so they couldn’t contact anybody. He seems to remember pretty much everything and is eager to leave and rejoin his wife, but when he gets to their hotel Liz doesn’t recognize him, and there is another man with her, another husband, another Martin Harris (Aidan Quinn). Sure of his own identity, remembering all his schedule, the next day he goes to his appointment with Professor Bressler (Sebastian Koch), only to find that the other Martin Harris is already there. Bizzarre thing, both men seem to know everything about Harris, they even use the same words, but the other guy has documents to prove his identity, our Harry doesn’t. The shock makes him faint and he finds himself again at the hospital, where a kind nurse gives him the name and address of her friend Jurgen (Bruno Ganz) who “finds people”. He’s sedated for an exam, and then a bad guy comes in to take him away. Martin manages to escape and goes to meet that man Jurgen hoping for help. He tells him everything. Jurgen believes him and starts working the case, finding out a good reason why someone should want to take his place: a certain Prince Shaba will be attending a party where Harris is invited, along with Bressler and a few other people. There have been already assassination attempts on the prince’s life, and being Harris someone could have a very good chance to kill him. Martin finds Gina with the help of her friend Biko (Clint Dyer) and convinces her to help him and to offer him hospitality. At her home, they are attacked by two men. During the fight, she finds Biko dead and then manages to kill one of those guys. They escape while the other man chases them. They are in this together now, and he wants to talk to Liz alone, to understand why she’s pretending not to know him. He knows where he can find her alone, and she tells him to look for the missing suitcase.
Jurgen was a member of the Stasi police, and when he receives a phone call from Martin’s “friend” Rodney Cole, and understands that the man is part of a secret mercenary group called Section 15. He is very ill, he has cancer, and he knows that there’s no way he could escape Section 15, so he waits for him at home and kills himself with cyanide without revealing anything of what he knows.
Martin retrieves his suitcase with his documents, and is now relieved to see the name Martin Harris on his passport. He gives Gina some money and says goodbye, then he meets Cole who says that he took the first flight after he received his alarming phone call. Martin thinks he’s here to help him, but instead he abducts him with the help of the surviving man that tried to kill him at Gina’s place.
Gina sees them take Martin away and she steals a taxi to follow them. She’s far behind but still manages to find them. They plan to kill him making it look like an overdose, but she arrives in time to kill them both with her car. Not before they’ve had time to talk to him though, and he learns that he’s NOT Martin Harris after all, nor is the other man for that matter. It’s a fictional identity that he himself created as part of his assassination plan. He’s shocked, but he remembers that he was here in Berlin three months earlier and that he planted a bomb, so they rush together to the hotel to save the prince and everybody in that room. He manages to convince the hotel security guys by telling them the exact date he arrived, and luckily they still have the footage of three months ago (how long do they keep it?) and upon seeing his face they ring the alarm and evacuate the place. Liz stays behind to deactivate the bomb but fails and dies in the explosion. Martin kills the other Martin before he can complete his mission and kill professor Bressler, the real target. Politics had nothing to do with it, it was all a financial matter: his research of a type of corn that could survive everywhere is worth lots of money, and at the end he will announce that thanks to the prince’s help he will make it a gift to the world.
Last scene shows us ‘Martin’ and Gina with fake documents and new identities boarding a train together.
Now, first thing first the taxi was not speeding, there was traffic, so it’s not really believable that she would drive her car off the bridge; I mean, she swerved to avoid a fridge falling down a truck and then again to avoid a bike coming her way, but she accelerated and never hit the brakes? Possible, though.
The first assassin had already killed one nurse, and proceeded to kill the kind nurse too, and yet he planned to take him away alive, although they later intend to kill him? Why? To make it look like a sedated, confused patient killed then and then went out only to die of overdose? Doesn’t seem like such a brilliant plan, one would expect more from the legendary section 15. Still, again it’s possible.
The first few scenes after he woke up were even rather annoying, shouting at people and ordering them around, I guess in his identity of an American Doctor he thought everybody should bow to his presence and obey without a word, but he was being totally unreasonable. I know this can be explained by what happened to him, still I think that his behaviour before he met the other Martin was too borderline, there was yet no reason to act so weirdly.
A frail girl who accepts to let a stranger man sleep in her home has no trouble in telling him exactly how much money she has and in appearing before him with only a tank top and no bra - does she think she lives in Gentlemen’s World who never really existed??
That same frail girl not only has the guts to kill the first assassin (who tried to kill her too, so fair enough), but she does much more. She doesn’t waste a second to decide that she wants to help him and in finding a cab to steal; while driving, she’s able to recognize Cole’s black car far away up a parking lot, has no trouble killing two more men to help a man she’s only known a day; she’s able to fight security trained men; she follows him voluntarily to the hotel after knowing who he really was and that he planted a bomb there.
Obviously they end up together, in movies there’s only one reason to put a man and a woman together in the plot: they must end up together at the end.
Liz wants to deactivate the bomb because she doesn’t want her face to be connected with a bomb that is of no more use to them now. Of course she doesn’t know that they already have her face and already know all about the bomb, but she was supposed to be so precise, so efficient, and she has no idea how much time left she has? Even though she activated the bomb herself?
Apart from the fact that since she couldn’t reach down enough with her arm she could have broken the wall a bit more. That was a stupid death in my opinion, and there’s no excuse for the fact that she didn’t know how much time she had. They probably did it this way so that Martin wouldn’t have to kill her, he only killed the man :-/
It’s not even worth talking about a man who could barely stand managed to escape from a trained assassin: that’s basic action-movie stuff.
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