The premise: Liotta is a Seattle medical examiner, working with the police. Everyone in town believes he murdered his wife, but he got off on tainted evidence. “Wear a crash helmet if you go out with him,” a woman advises Fiorentino. She is a university researcher whose experiments with rats indicate that the brain stores its memories in a clear fluid which, if transferred to another rat, gives that rat the first rat’s memories—but only in the presence of a strong stimulus to trigger them. A cat, for example, to chase it through a maze.
Liotta hears Fiorentino explaining her theory, and sees a way to clear his name and discover his wife’s murderer. He will inject himself with his dead wife’s brain fluid, mixed with Fiorentino’s secret elixir, while he’s in the room where his wife was murdered. The stimulus will kick in, and he’ll witness her murder through her memories.
How does he obtain her brain fluid? Well, luckily, it’s stored in a clear vial in the evidence room of the police department, so he can simply steal it. Good thing this stuff has a long shelf life at room temperature, eh? And so Liotta is off on his quest. Soon he’s joined by Fiorentino, who warns him that 30 percent of the rats in her experiments have died of heart attacks. No problem-o: He takes a nitroglycerin pill right before injecting himself.
The plot careens through an endless series of astonishing developments. Fans of those old horror films of the 1930s will remember that all a Mad Scientist has to do is inject himself with a miraculous substance, and it works perfectly, almost every time. That’s what happens here. Liotta drains brain fluids from corpses. From comatose cops. From a victim of the drugstore massacre (she was an art student, so he learns he can draw—and sketches her murderer). And the fluids kick in right on time.
It’s never really explained how he deals with four or five conflicting sets of memories, all sloshing around in his brain. No matter. His mental life resembles a human channel-changer. All he needs is a stimulus, and whoosh!—he has a flashback. Sometimes he thinks he is a killer, and repeats old crimes. Meanwhile, the list of suspects grows shorter, because, as we all know, the secret killer has to be someone in the movie, and there are only so many possibilities.
Fiorentino played one of the most forcible women in recent movies in The Last Seduction. As her punishment, she now plays one of the least. Get this. The movie’s device for keeping her in the picture is that, since Liotta may have a heart attack, she’ll follow him around to be sure he’s okay. That puts her on the scene for a series of amazing revelations, and gives us someone to explain the ending, which functions as without any question the single least appropriate intro in history for Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.”
The actors play this material perfectly straight, as if they thought this was a serious movie, or even a good one. That makes it all the more agonizing. At least in the old horror films, the actors knew how marginal the material was, and worked a little irony into their performances. Here everybody acts as if they’re in something deep, like a Bergman film, or Chicago Hope.
I have nothing in principle against goofy films. Hey, I’m the guy who liked Congo. But Unforgettable is truly strange—a movie that begins with an absurd premise and follows it doggedly through a plot so labyrinthine that, at the end, I found myself thinking back to Fiorentino’s experiment. The first rat couldn’t find its way through the maze, and was cornered by the cat. The second rat, after an injection of brain fluid, zipped through the maze. Trying to find my way through this plot, I felt like the first rat.
Universal Soldier
(Directed by Roland Emmerich; starring Jerry Orbach, Jean-Claude Van Damme; 1992)
One of my favorite parts in science fiction movies is the explanation of the science, which is usually very heavy on the fiction. In Universal Soldier, for example, we are given two Vietnam-era soldiers who are killed in action (by each other) and then packed in ice so their bodies can be used in a secret government project to create “UniSols”—android fighting machines. Twenty-five years later, not having aged a day, they go into action.
How did this scientific breakthrough take place? It’s up to the brilliant Dr. Gregor (Jerry Orbach) to explain. As nearly as I can recall, he “hypercharged their bodies to turn dead flesh into living tissue.” So now we know. The refitted UniSols look like muscular human beings, but wear funny little monoculars that send out a TV signal (of startlingly low quality). They are strong, acrobatic, and versatile, and can be controlled by their leaders, but wouldn’t you know that two of the units have combat flashbacks to Vietnam and remember that they hate one another.
The wayward units are Luc (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Scott (Dolph Lundgren). In ’Nam, Luc wanted only to go home, and Scott wanted only to kill, and when Luc saw Scott conducting a one-man My Lai massacre, he tried to stop him and then both wound up on the recycling heap. Their minds are supposed to have been wiped clean of all memories, but when the flashbacks begin, each man’s orientation has been defined by his strongest motivation at the time of his death.
Enter now the most interesting character in the movie, a TV newswoman named Veronica, played by Ally Walker with style and personality that would grace a much more ambitious movie than this one. Walker, fired by her network, goes freelance and discovers the secret of the UniSols, leading to a long series of action scenes in which Van Damme tries to protect her and Lundgren tries to kill them both.
The centerpiece of the action is a chase between a prison bus and the armored UniSols van, along narrow desert roads on the edge of deep precipices. I suppose there is a market for this sort of thing among bubblebrained adolescents of all ages, but it takes a good chase scene indeed to rouse me from the lethargy induced by dozens and dozens of essentially similar sequences. I have got to the point where the obligatory climax (vehicle hurtles over edge, bursts into fireball) is exciting only because it means the damn chase is finally over.
So back to Ally Walker. If you see this movie, watch her carefully. She is given an absurd character to play, but she has a screen personality that implies wit and intelligence even when the dialogue provides her with nothing to work with. She has some of the same qualities as Debra Winger, and brings scenes to life simply through the energy of her presence. To my astonishment I found myself interested in what she was saying, and if she can sell this dialogue, she can play anything.
As for Lundgren and Van Damme: It must be fairly thankless to play lunks who have to fight for the entire length of a movie while exchanging monosyllabic idiocies. At the Cannes Film Festival in May, the two stars found themselves on the same red carpet, going up the formal staircase to an evening screening. They exchanged words and got into a shoving match, right there in front of the world’s TV cameras. Some said it was a publicity stunt. I say if you can do one thing and do it well, stick to it.
Very Bad Things
(Directed by Peter Berg; starring Cameron Diaz, Christian Slater, Daniel Stern; 1998)
Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things isn’t a bad movie, just a reprehensible one. It presents as comedy things that are not amusing. If you think this movie is funny, that tells me things about you that I don’t want to know.
What bothers me most, after two viewings, is its confidence that an audience would be entertained by its sad, sick vision, tainted by racism. If this material had been presented straight, as a drama, the movie would have felt more honest and might have been more successful. Its cynicism is the most unattractive thing about it—the assumption that an audience has no moral limits and will laugh at cruelty simply to feel hip. I know moral detachment is a key strategy of the ironic pose, but there is a point, once reached, that provides a test of your underlying values.