Movies
Unforgettable
John Dahl branches out from his film noir pastiches, Kill Me Again, Red Rock West, The Last Seduction. He starts out in or near that same neighborhood, at a multiple-homicide crime scene where the Seattle P. D. medical examiner (Ray Liotta) gets to show off one of the "Dick Tracy" tricks of his trade: a smoke machine that illuminates, under infrared light, the tracks of the perpetrator on the premises. Soon, however, the filmmaker goes far afield, into a neurobiologist's lab in search of an experimental memory-transfer serum. The injection -- a literal one: the movie is a festival of hypodermic syringes -- of a science-fictional element might have been expected to perk up the neo-noir doldrums of Dahl's earlier work. Instead, his unaltered broodiness seems simply unappreciative of, insensitive to, the greater lunacies at his fingertips. Lip service is paid to the potential benefits of the postulated serum to science in general and to criminology in particular. But any such benefits are thoroughly overshadowed by the more obvious benefits to slothful plotters of murder mysteries: the ability, the excuse, the free hand, to reconstruct the crime in tangible bits and pieces, teasingly doled out over feature-length. With Linda Fiorentino, Peter Coyote, Christopher McDonald, David Paymer. 1996.
Reader Rating:
MPAA Rating: R