Should Have Stayed Dead

What would happen if a bunch of very talented people got together and somehow made a very bad movie? The result would be something like Dead Again, a vaguely supernatural mystery-thriller from 1991.

Just a couple years after his critically lauded film interpretation of Henry V, Kenneth Branagh decided to do something completely different. This is the story of a private investigator who agrees to take in a woman who has lost both her memory and (initially) her ability to speak. He seeks out any help to try and learn her true identity, including a hypotist whose efforts to unlock her memory end up instead tapping into a past life of hers, in which she remembers a brutal murder.

The plot actually sounds pretty cool on paper. The cast makes it sound even better. Branagh himself plays the investigator (and, in the memory/flashbacks, a man accused of murdering his wife). Emma Thompson is the mystery amnesiac (and, in the flashbacks, the murder victim). Derek Jacobi is the strange hypnotist exploring the past life. Along the way, Andy Garcia, Robin Williams, and Wayne Knight all appear in supporting roles.

But the movie is disappointingly less than the sum of its parts. The dialogue feels ripped from a bad soap opera, and these otherwise fine actors deliver melodramatic performances only worthy of that material. The film manages a few cheap "make you jump" scares, but never anything more suspenseful than a Boy Scout "there on the car door handle was THE HOOK!" campfire story. It's all just plain hokey.

The only thing that saves the movie from being a total bust is that in the final 20 minutes or so, the crafting of the story suddenly shows some surprising intelligence. Oh, the dialogue doesn't improve, and if anything, that actual staging of everything for the camera gets worse. But the plot does suddenly unveil some revelations and make a few clever connections that buy back some of the preceding hour-and-a-half of crap.

But more than anything, it makes you wish that some other screen writer had taken this story concept and written a better version of it. With a cast like this, I have to believe that somehow, somewhere, a grade A movie is buried deep in this mess. Instead, what results is a D+ at best. It's to be watched only if you have a morbid curiosity to see how so many good ingredients could blend to make something so bad.