Unforgettable

I have a feeling that in a month or two, maybe three, I won’t remember a thing about this movie. Ray Liotta is a medical examiner in Seattle who was accused of murdering his wife, and got off because of tainted evidence that was thrown out. Most people still believe he did it, and he’s desperate to find the real killer. Linda Fiorentino is a scientist who has made some kind of serum from cerebro-spinal fluid that somehow enables the transfer of memories from one rat to another. But it plays hell with their hearts. Ray thinks it can recover the memories from his dead wife, so naturally he injects himself with it. He finds what he thinks is the real killer, but …

The movie goes along well for a while, and then sort of loses it. We know the real killer has to be one of two people, and the script leans so heavily on one of them that we know it has to be the other one. And sure enough. If I can figure out whodunit that early in a movie or book I lose a lot of respect for the writer, because I’m not good at that. And I love Linda Fiorentino, but she is wasted in this. Here she is a rather timid researcher, and she’s much better in harder, tougher parts, like in the previous movie she made for this same director, John Dahl, The Last Seduction. I felt hers was the best performance of 1994, and she was cheated out of an Oscar by a rules technicality.