Amazon.com video review:
Like Body Heat before it, D.O.A. demonstrates why the
noir
thriller deserved to be brought
back--if done well. This movie, inspired by the 1949 Edmund O'Brien
version, begins powerfully. A man
stumbles into a police station to report a murder: his own. Writer Dexter
Cornell (Dennis Quaid), an
unhappy English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been
poisoned. He has 24 hours to
unveil his killer. It's a complex plot of forgotten dreams, dysfunctional relationships, and
primarily bitterness. But it's so
effectively directed (by Max Headroom's Annabel Jankel and
Rocky Morton) and so
powerfully acted, it draws its audience into its puzzling and dark,
hopeless world. Meg Ryan, who teamed the previous year with her now-husband
Quaid in Innerspace,
demonstrates her range well. The year before she played a put-upon
career woman, but here she is
completely credible as sweetly youthful student Sydney Fuller, who has a crush
on her professor and becomes
embroiled in his tragedy, while falling in love. Other excellent performances include Rob Knepper as aspiring writer-student
Nicholas Lang;
Charlotte Rampling as Lang's creepy, powerful mother; Jane Kaczmarek as
Cornell's
ex-wife, and Wonder
Years voice Daniel Stern as an ambitious fellow teacher.
--N.F. Mendoza
