It categorized every story ever told into one of 36 templates. I remember "Love Returned" and "Love Not Returned" were among the 36.
Another guru posited 12 basic stories. Another pegged the number at 7.
I think it may be true there is a finite number of story shapes. Or at least a finite number of shapes we've discovered and passed down in the last few thousand years.
And I suppose we add to the total every now and then.
After all, it's hard to imagine "mediocre-court-composer-murders-world's-greatest-musician-and-steals-his-music-only-to-mourn-him-the-rest-of-his-life" existed as a story type before Amadeus hit theaters. Who knows, though.
What's easy to imagine is that the new skull-cracking action thriller Unknown is NOT a new entry into the Master Plots pantheon.
This is a story we've seen many times before.
And I always love it.
The movie places Liam Neeson's biotech scientist and his lovely wife Betty Draper -- I mean January Jones -- in Berlin, where Neeson is set to participate in an important conference on the Food of Tomorrow.
Neeson reaches his fancy hotel only to discover he's left his important briefcase at the airport.
He jumps in a taxi, sans wife, to go back for it.
Then fate intervenes.
A truckload of spilled barrels creates a dangerous situation on a bridge over an icy river, and faster than you can say "action set piece" Neeson's cab is IN THE RIVER, and he's unconscious, and it's sinking, and he's saved only by the quick thinking of his scrumptious Eastern European cab driver, sexy Diane Kruger.
Neeson is revived on the scene by paramedics. He awakens in the hospital four days later.
With--
WITH...
...amnesia.

To make matters worse, Neeson finds Betty Draper carousing with another man, a man with Neeson's name, credentials... his entire life.
So maybe Neeson isn't actually who he thought he was.
But if that's true, why are there shadowy figures following him around and trying to kill him?
Answer me that!!!
Despite the "reverse" wrinkle, this is still the basic amnesia plotline, and it works here just the way it worked in the Bourne movies and the great Roger Zelazny Amber novels.
Hero needs to figure out his real identity before it catches up to him and kills him.
Awesome.
This basic story shape is so much fun -- it's an action movie wrapped around a mystery -- that it's hard to screw up, even if you cast implausibly attractive women in the role of cab drivers and uncork a third act twist so head-spinning I actually heard a voice in my head say "Uhhhhhhhh... prob'ly not." But then another voice in my head said, "Shhh, Neeson's about to go on another killing spree" and I quietly enjoyed the rest of the movie.

Is it fun swirling around a vortex of total plot collapse for a hundred minutes before getting sucked in and crushed?
It's a heck of a lot of fun.
SCORE
How Accomplished: 62/100
How Much I Enjoyed: 80/100