Unforgettable (1996 film)

Unforgettable
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	John Dahl
Produced by	Dino De Laurentiis Martha Schumacher
Written by	Bill Geddie
Starring	Ray Liotta Linda Fiorentino Peter Coyote Christopher McDonald Kim Coates David Paymer Kim Cattrall
Music by	Christopher Young
Cinematography	Jeff Jur
Edited by	Eric L. Beason Scott Chestnut
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release dates	February 23, 1996 (1996-02-23)
Running time	117 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$18 million
Box office	$2,821,671

Unforgettable is a 1996 thriller film with science fiction elements, directed by John Dahl, and starring Ray Liotta and Linda Fiorentino. The film is about a man named David Krane (Liotta), who is obsessed with finding out who murdered his wife.

Unforgettable is John Dahl's follow up to his critically acclaimed 1994 film, The Last Seduction. The film, however, was a critical and box office failure, only earning less than $3 million in the United States.^[1]

Plot

Dr. David Krane (Ray Liotta) is unsuccessfully framed for the murder of his wife. He then attempts to find the true killer, with the help of Dr. Martha Briggs (Linda Fiorentino), by using an experimental drug that allows him to experience another person's memories. The drug takes a heavy toll on Krane and it's a race to find out the truth before time runs out. The more Krane take the drug, the more memories become personal for him Dr. Briggs tries to put a stop to the drug, but Krane becomes obsessed with finding the real killer, as well as causing Krane to lose his sanity.

Even his own colleagues begin to doubt his innocence. In the end it is revealed that a policeman named Don Bresler (Peter Coyote) was the one who killed Krane's wife, in order to frame the prime suspect in the murder, Eddie Dutton (Kim Coates). Bressler framed Dutton due to the fact that Bressler was corrupt, and that Dutton was a scapegoat, and that he knew too much. Earlier, Dutton gets cornered in a church where he took a boy hostage, but Bresler shoots and kills Eddie before Krane was going to tell him who actually killed his wife.

Bresler goes to jail for a long time, while Krane ends up in a comatose state due to an overdose of the drug. Briggs and Stewart Gleick (Christopher McDonald), Bresler's partner, speculate that the comatose Krane is in a 'better place' where he can be with his late wife.

Cast

• Ray Liotta as Dr. David Krane
• Linda Fiorentino as Dr. Martha Briggs
• Peter Coyote as Don Bresler
• Christopher McDonald as Stewart Gleick
• Kim Coates as Eddie Dutton
• David Paymer as Curtis Avery
• Kim Cattrall as Kelly
• William B. Davis as Dr. Smoot

Production

Filming

Ray Liotta told an interviewer some anecdotes about filming in the morgue:

Q. Since you spend a fair amount of time in the morgue in Unforgettable, do you have any crazy coroner's tales to relate?
A. The morgue in L.A. was horrible, scary. The smell is just unbelievable. A couple of people who work there wanted to take pictures. So they took photos with bodies behind me.
Q. You mean, they took photos of you, Ray Liotta, the movie star, in the city morgue?
A. Yeah, that happened to me in two other rather strange places. For Unlawful Entry, these cops were looking for a body part. I was on-call with them, and so sure enough, they took a photograph of me with the body bag in the background. With Article 99, I played a surgeon. I did some research on open-heart surgery, and the nurses were "Oh, yeah, you're Shoeless Joe from Field of Dreams. Can we take a picture?" So there was this patient, her chest wide open, and they're taking pictures of me.^[2]

Reception

Box office

The film had an estimated budget of $18 million and earned $2,780,278 in the United States.^[1]

Critical response

The film received negative reviews from critics and holds a 23% "Rotten" rating on aggregate review site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 26 reviews, with an average score of 4.4/10.^[3]

Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, said, "Though it's well made, Unforgettable is also gimmicky, with too much of the plot revolving around voyeuristic tricks. Tapping into the same kind of virtual reality gambit seen in Strange Days, Unforgettable deals with one person's ability to borrow the experiences of others... Insanely far-fetched as this is, it's hardly dull. Mr. Dahl's visual imagination is in fine form, even if his storytelling shows no great eagerness to escape from the B-movie sphere."^[4]

Roger Ebert gave the film one and a half stars, calling it "a mess": "In the annals of cinematic goofiness, Unforgettable deserves a place of honor. This is one of the most convoluted, preposterous movies I've seen — a thriller crossed with lots of Mad Scientist stuff, plus wild chases, a shoot-out in a church, a woman taped to a chair in a burning room, an exploding university building, adultery, a massacre in a drugstore, gruesome autopsy scenes and even a moment when a character's life flashes before her eyes, which was more or less what was happening to me by the end of the film. What went wrong?... 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."^[5]

The Miami Herald granted the film two out of four stars: "But there's little joy in watching the puzzle come together, since the script, by newcomer Bill Geddie, cheats. It's impossible for the viewer to solve the case alongside Krane: The movie withholds crucial information until a revelation-packed denouement. On a purely visceral level, the movie works better. At its best, Unforgettable recalls prime Hitchcock in the way it unearths great suspense in familiar situations, such as a long footchase and a supermarket robbery. The performances are strong, too. Liotta is an ideal choice: Even at his most sympathetic, he seems capable of great evil — he has the eyes of a madman — but the movie settles the issue of his culpability too early... Dahl has made his name making movies intelligent and cynical; this one is neither. It's a genre piece that buries a terrific premise under a pile of contrivances. It's also a first for Dahl: a movie that's more fun to look at than it is to think about."^[6]

Reviewer Bryant Frazer gave the film a C- and wrote, "Liotta and Fiorentino look kind of sleepy throughout the whole proceeding... but still, it has its moments, including the very ending, that really work — as if somewhere, buried inside this mess, there's a good movie trying to get out."^[7]

Chris Kridler of The Baltimore Sun did like the film, calling it "a pretty twisted story, contrived but entertaining."^[8]

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle described director Dahl as "a master of inciting fear and dread" and the film as "a striking piece of filmmaking... For a good 45 minutes of its two-hour running time, Unforgettable has the viewer in a state of oppressive tension. The rest of the time you're just nervous."^[9]

References

External links

• Unforgettable at the Internet Movie Database
• Unforgettable at Box Office Mojo