Will he be overwhelmed by piccolos or flutes?
Dead Again (1991) is fundamentally a story about revenge, the revenge of a young boy on his stepmother, the stepmother on her husband, the young boy on the stepmother again, and, I suppose, an artist on her critics.
Maybe.
I found my credulity strained by the hypnotic regression sequences in which we discover the artist, Amanda Sharp, was once piano virtuoso Roman Strauss, executed shortly after World War II for the murder of his wife, who, in turn, may be in the, ah, spiritual past of investigator Mike Church.
Put that way, it’s clear why I didn’t find it all that tolerable.
Which is too bad, because the acting is nice, and Church happens to be running around in a late 1950s/60s Corvette, which I always appreciate. But it’s not enough to get me around the inherent silliness of the plot, which involves hypnotic regression, an antiques dealer, the artist-as-mysterious amnesiac, the investigator scraping for bucks, and etc. The reality was that I kept trying to find a way to explain it without resorting to silly hypnotic regression and risible past lives explanations, and just couldn’t get there.
So I’d say see it if you’re a Kenneth Branagh or Emma Thompson or Wayne Knight completist. You say you don’t recognize Wayne Knight?
Think dinosaurs. Which would have been fun in Dead Again.
