Unforgettable - Putting An Addictive Personality To Good Use

Aug

13

Unforgettable - Putting An Addictive Personality To Good Use

≡ Category: Action, Drama, Highly Recommended, Movie Reviews By Country, Suspense, Under the Radar, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama/Action/Suspense
Director: John Dahl
Year: 1998

Rating:

UNDER THE RADAR

Life isn’t fair. Despite being a tremendously accomplished film noir, Unforgettable is largely forgotten today. What should have been a triumph for director John Dahl and star Ray Liotta was instead a box office disaster, contributing to the decline of both men’s careers. My guess is the culprit was the science fiction twist at the heart of the script.

Police Medical Examiner Dr. David Krane (Ray Liotta) is obsessed over the murder of his wife, years after the fact. He has good reason: while the deed was being done, he was passed out drunk on the lawn outside. In fact, Krane would have been on death row for the crime if he hadn’t been let off on a technicality.

Cases don’t come much colder than this, but Dr. Krane has a crazy notion of how he could solve the murder. (Here’s where Dahl lost the audience, I think.) You see, Dr. Martha Briggs (an uncharacteristically nerdy Linda Fiorentino), a researcher at a local university, has developed a serum that stimulates memory in rats. Apparently, if you take the brain fluid from one rat, combine it with this drug, and inject it into a second rat, the second rat will experience the most traumatic experiences of the first rat.

Dr. Krane decides the time is ripe to perform human trials…on himself. It works like gangbusters. By taking brain fluid from people who were in a position to know something about the murder and injecting it along with the drug, Krane gets closer and closer to solving the mystery of his wife’s death. There’s only one problem. The drug is partially composed of substances which cause heart damage. Will Krane be able to solve the mystery before he keels over from a heart attack or the real culprits assist him in his headlong rush into an early grave?

Let’s face it — people aren’t used to seeing noir mixed with wildly speculative science fiction. And ultimately, the general public just couldn’t swallow the premise. That’s their loss.

Unforgettable is actually pretty brilliant. Once you’ve accepted it, the premise allows for a ton of suspense, and a unique and entertaining way of delivering exposition. In the memory sequences, director John Dahl isn’t literal — he allows himself the luxury of multiple viewpoints. Dahl compensates for this stylistic poetic license by having Dr. Krane physically react to the memories as raw experience. For example, at one point, Krane inadvertently throttles Dr. Briggs because he’s reliving the memory of a perpetrator assaulting a victim.

The forward motion of the screenplay by Bill Geddie is relentless, and the direction by John Dahl is punchy and exciting. The colors and shadows are rich and the camera prowls through the scenery, as restless as Dr. Krane. This baby moves.

Ray Liotta was an inspired choice to play Dr. Krane. He’s convincing as an addictive, live-wire personality, which helps sell the idea that he would do something as crazy as take an unproven drug only tested on lab rats in the hope that it would help him find his wife’s killer. Linda Fiorentino is surprisingly effective as a socially inept research scientist. Usually, when you get someone like Denise Richards to play a rocket scientist, the results are risable, but Fiorentino is convincing. The casting beyond the leads is flavorful too, with character actors like David Paymer, Christopher McDonald, and Kim Coates leaving a pungent impression.

Unforgettable isn’t perfect. One minor flaw — based on casting and other clues, you’ll probably guess who the main villain is well before the big reveal, but the fun in this case is the journey. That’s what happens when you have compelling characters, a twisty script and muscular direction. And it’s too bad that the ending shows a failure of nerve. The filmmakers pull back from the logical ending, indeed the only ending that makes emotional sense, but that isn’t enough to ruin the movie. It only made me curse the test screenings which value the blatherings of Joe and Jane Q. Public over the work of talented screenwriters and directors.

If you’re literal minded, like many Americans, and insist on kitchen sink realism in detective movies, you probably won’t appreciate Unforgettable. But if you’re up for an imaginative twist on a traditional noir, executed with flair and professionalism, you’re in for a treat.