Mort à l'arrivée

Fast-paced remake of the exclellent 1949 film-noir. With Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan on fine, romantic form

Quaid is the English professor who walks into a police station and reports a murder: his own. He has 24 hours to live after having been given poison, and is determined to use the remainder of his life to find his killer.

This film is fast-paced and littered with corpses and more red herrings than Brixton market, but the direction and script never gel. Despite a competent and charming performance by Quaid, paired with his real-life wife-to-briefly-be Ryan (a romance necessarily also conducted at top speed), D.O.A. is let down by a cop-out ending.

As this film opens Professor Dexter Cornell enters a police station to report a murder... his own. As he sits down to tell his story to the police the action jumps back thirty six hours.

Cornell is a Lecturer and novelist although he hasn't written a book in for years and can't be bothered to read a work written by a keen student. The next thing he knows that student plummets past his window and dies on the concrete below. That isn't the only thing going wrong; his wife wants a divorce and it later emerges was having an affair with the student. On learning this he decides to get very drunk. The next morning he wakes up in the bed of student Sydney Fuller with a killer hangover. In fact he feels so bad he goes to hospital and discovers that he has been poisoned with radium chloride and only has a day or two left to live. He is determined to discover who poisoned him and why.

This isn't really a remake of the 1949 film as it only takes the central premise of that film; here we get an entirely set of characters and motives. The opening is a great hook then the story takes its time getting to the point where Cornell discovers he was poisoned. This give us time to meet the various suspects, and student Sydney who will get caught up in the hunt for the truth. Once he learns what happened the tension rises quickly... so does the body count as he finds himself suspected of one murder and targeted by people who think he knows more than he does. Dennis Quaid is impressive as the doomed Professor Cornell and Meg Ryan is fun as Sydney; the rest of the cast is solid too. There are plenty of good action sequences and a few really good surprises... even if the identity of the killer and the motive aren't too surprising. The film has a great neo-noir look; opening in black and white before switching to colour in the flashback; colour that fades as his condition worsens. Overall I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to people wanting a good mystery.

D.O.A has a good premise, borrowed from a 1950 film of the same name and a 1969 film entitled Color Me Dead. But beyond the premise it fails to develop into anything worthwhile. The script mistakes ludicrousness for cleverness; the directors peculiarly seem to think they're making a pop video rather than a film; and Dennis Quaid puts on a weird grin and raises his eyebrows maniacally as if he's auditioning as a Jack Nicholson impersonator. It's good for a laugh but, since that wasn't the original intention, it's hard to rate this as a worthwhile film.

English lecturer Dexter Cornell (Quaid) is a bitter, bored shell of a man. Formerly a great author, he never recovered from the critical failure of his fourth and final novel and vowed never to write again. Without the drive of writing to fill his life, he gave up on everything else too, including his marriage and his dedication to the job. When pupil Nick Lang (Rob Knepper) apparently commits suicide after handing in an assignment, Cornell hits the booze to get over the shock. But soon thereafter, he learns that he has drunk a slow-acting poison, and that within 48 hours he will be dead. So close to death, he finally finds a renewed purpose in being alive.... as, aided by student Sydney Fuller (Meg Ryan), he desperately attempts to solve his own "murder".

It's such a good idea that one can hardly imagine how it could fail. But it does. It really, really does fail in a big way. All the pointlessly fancy camera angles, all the inappropriate musical scoring, and especially the jaw-droppingly stupid solution to the mystery, conspire to ruin the film. D.O.A stands for "Dead On Arrival", and that's the perfect adjectival phrase for the entire film. Some day, this wonderful idea for a film might be used once again to better effect, but for now you'd be best advised to stick with the 1950 version.

Those wishing to see film noir remakes, should not see this as as a remake, you will always be disappointed. Instead, enjoy a gripping performance from Dennis Quaid and visual imagery to commend. The colour drains from the film (literally, not metaphorically!)) as the plot gathers pace, and the dialogue is crisp and gritty. The opening dialogue is clever, and the viewer is carried along by a sharp screenplay and a real, original film noir feel,

OK, so this film may not have won any Oscars, but it is not a bad film. The original "D.O.A." is undoubtedly a better film, but that does not mean this film is bad.

The film stars Dennis Quaid in one of his early roles, when he was first becoming really famous, after "The Right Stuff" made him a star, and a very lovely looking Meg Ryan, when she was still now quite famous.

This is more of an "update" of the 1950 film, rather than a remake, since the setting is different and the characters too, are different. The plot is pretty much the same. A man (this time an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin) is poisoned and he has only 24 hours to find out who poisoned him and why. Meg Ryan plays a young college student who tries to help him. Jane Kaczmarek plays Quaid's estranged wife, in a low key, but intense performance; she steals every scene she is in. Daniel Stern (also in an early role, before "Home Alone" made him famous) plays Quaid's colleague. Charlotte Rampling is fine too in a supporting role.

The entire cast is top notch; The film is stylish, with a quick pace that keeps you guessing until the end.

I think this is a film that is certainly worth watching as a thriller, and as a modern version of a classic film.