Don't let the others adjust your life, pick it, and watch this scary succeeding way

"Imaging your life need Adjustment...

don't give up, it's should be better in your own way"

Matt Damon is doing things a lot of top movie stars are sometimes scared to do: spreading his image thin among a range of roles, directors, and material. His forays away from the huge successes of, say, the Bourne movies or the Ocean's series which have highlighted his fully realized strengths as a buff action hero who can also slip effortlessly into natural comic charm aren't exactly risky. His image as a leading-man movie star is pretty much sealed, but in movies like The Informant, Invictus, Hereafter, True Grit, and others, he's stretching some different muscles that take him closer to character-actor territory. That has largely been a good thing for his fans, if not for his box-office stats.


The Adjustment Bureau takes him somewhere in between--he's in leading-man territory with the Damon charisma in full bore and giving his all to a story that needs the toned actorly muscle he provides. Based on a novelette by science-fiction icon Philip K. Dick, The Adjustment Bureau exposes a cadre of people who are either superhuman or nonhumans and control the world by magically influencing the fate of every single person in it. Damon plays David Norris, an aspiring politician who rose from working-class roots in Brooklyn (a not-so-closeted skeleton that sometimes comes back to haunt him) to wealth and the likely promise of high office. Unfortunately, David takes some liberties with his fate that don't correspond with the narrative laid out by "the Chairman," the entity in charge of the Adjustment Bureau autocrats whose matching fedoras are none-too-subtle symbols for wings.

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Watching "Unknown" in Your Home

"What should you do when you find the other self of you?"

The surprise hit Taken, from 2008, contained a number of red meat pleasures, but chief among them was Liam Neeson's reinvention as an action hero, turning his trademark wounded brusqueness and gentle-giant physique towards new, head-clunking avenues. Despite an ad campaign that makes it appear to be a direct action-packed continuation of that earlier film, Unknown proves to be a somewhat different creature--a sleek mystery that occasionally gives in to temptation and lets its hulking star call down the righteous thunder. Based on a novel by Didier Van Cauwelaert, the story follows a mild-mannered botanist in Berlin with his wife (Mad Men's January Jones) for a mysterious scientific conference. After a freak car accident, he wakes up in the hospital with scrambled memories, missing identification, and--most ominously--someone else claiming to be him. Director Jaume Collet-Serra, previously responsible for the admirably berserko Orphan, handles the early paranoiac cloak-and-dagger passages with aplomb (and delivers one quick beaut of a car chase), but proves less sure-footed when the story drifts towards more conventional Bourne-style punch-ups.

Thankfully, Neeson does a fine job keeping things grounded whenever the narrative starts to wander, with able support from Diane Kruger as a cab driver unwillingly along for the ride. There's the germ of a genuinely intriguing, thoughtful thriller inside Unknown--particularly during a superbly minimalist scene between supporting cast members Frank Langella and Bruno Ganz--but it mostly seems content to stay within the realm of a high-pedigreed, reasonably taught action film. Which isn't all that bad of a thing, really.

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