It’s a peculiar and possibly a little myopic phenomenon that Liam Neeson is only recently being popularly categorized as an American action hero. First off, he’s Irish, but that’s beside the point. Having trained as a professional boxer before the theater caught his eye, he’s been punching people’s heads in for a good long time. At 58 years old, the man’s been steadily making movies for 30 years, and despite occasionally taking on some serious leading roles in award baiters like “Schindler’s List,” “Michael Collins” and “Kinsey,” let’s not forget he’s also got “Excalibur,” “Krull,” “Darkman” and “Phantom Menace” on his résumé. He is demonstrably capable of exuding either a pensive, sober intellectualism or, when tasked, bone crushing animal brutality. 

Last year’s “Taken” may have been the first to squarely match the two, and his newest vehicle “Unknown” strains to duplicate the model. Neeson is cast believably enough as a botanical engineer attending a European biotechnology summit. His life goes haywire when a random taxi crash cracks him on the noggin and leaves him alone, bruised and confused with no identification and half a memory to work with on the snowy streets of Berlin. Finding first that another man has assumed his name and position at the conference (as well as his lovely wife, who refuses to recognize the good doctor in any way) and soon thereafter that he’s being hunted down by a pair of mysterious hooligans in a white van, he sets out to discover who he is and what the hell is going on.

As an audience, we know nothing of this character and are just as clueless as he is. Director Jaume Collet-Serra, who’s last film “Orphan” shared a similarly Hitchockian twistiness, mischievously teases out just enough information to maintain paranoia and uncertainty as the main focus throughout the ensuing clue digging, car chasing and face bashing. And, unlike most modern espionage thrillers, the action, when it comes, has a delightful, real-world sloppiness. There’s not a whiff of CGI or the kind of mechanical choreography that have become so tiresome and ubiquitous in most contemporary thrillers. The fisticuffs that do occasionally break out have no apparent style of any kind, showing a rare and authentic gracelessness that often devolves into two guys just scuffling around on the ground and knocking over furniture. Yes, there are no fewer than three car chases, but not one of them lasts more than 40 seconds, and they all end, as these things probably would in the real world, with more embarrassment than escape. 

Everyone involved makes wonderfully human mistakes, from forgetting an important briefcase to leaving corpses lying around in hallways and hospital rooms. It’s a fairly brave film that allows its super-spies such glorious incompetence. It’s all perfectly silly, but the whole cast—including Dianne Kruger (“National Treasure”), January Jones (“Mad Men”), Frank Langella (“Frost/Nixon”) and Bruno “Angry Hitler” Ganz—seems in on the joke, playing through with marvelously straight faces. In one stunningly meta moment, our beleaguered botanist hero, with great gravity and all earnestness, blurts out, “We’ve discovered a new strain of corn!” Indeed, from this moment forward, let “Unknown” be known simply as “The Corn Identity.”

The film is by no means an earth shaker, but it plays fair, keeps its secrets playfully safe right until its bitter, ham-fisted end, and delivers entertainingly enough on the rugged aptitudes we’ve come to expect from America’s newest oldest action hero.