Pun Salad

This 2011 Liam Neeson flick worked its way to the top of the Netflix queue. It's a twisty tale of lost identity.

Liam plays Martin Harris, a doctor arriving in Berlin for a conference. He's accompanied by his lovely wife, Elizabeth. (Who's played by January Jones from Mad Men.) But—darn it!—Martin's misplaced his briefcase back at the airport. Without a word to Elizabeth, he's back in a cab, headed back to the airport to retrieve it. But there's a horrific accident, and Martin goes into a coma for days.

He expects to have his concerned wife at his bedside when he awakens. But she's not. He goes back to the hotel where they were staying, only to find that Elizabeth seemingly doesn't know him from Adam, and there's a new guy with her claiming to be Martin Harris. Whoa, what's going on?

Martin's pretty upset. He's also surprised when people start trying to kill him. (As moviewatchers, we are not surprised: that sort of thing happens in every movie like this.)

All is explained by the end, of course. Little clues are scattered throughout; I confess that I only figured them out in retrospect, and was as surprised at the Surprising Plot Twist as the filmmakers intended me to be. (I think it would have been even better to have opened the movie with Martin coming out of the coma, telling the previous events in flashback as necessary.)