MOVIE REVIEW : New Remake of ‘D.O.A.’ Is Dead on Arrival

In the first few minutes of “D.O.A.” (citywide) the film makers honor their source. They copy the unforgettable opening of the 1949 film noir classic in which the dying Edmond O’Brien stumbles into a police station to report his own murder by a slow-acting toxin that has given him 24 hours in which to find out who has poisoned him and why.

But once Dennis Quaid has dragged himself into a suitably Art Deco station and announced he’s all but Dead on Arrival, the film proceeds to unfold as a flashback with a predictable switch to color; c’mon, you didn’t expect Touchstone to be into black-and-white movies.

What’s not so predictable is that British directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (who created the video hero Max Headroom) and writer Charles Edward Pogue would all but jettison Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene’s soundly constructed 1949 story; Pogue, after all, wrote a terrific update of “The Fly” that improved considerably on the original. But here Pogue has come up with a yarn that defies plausibility as conscientiously as the earlier film strived to create it. Set vaguely in a hot Southwestern college town, this “D.O.A.” is all jazzed up with contemporary cynicism, up-to-the minute Neo Deco interiors and considerable erotic tension. Instead of O’Brien’s Average Joe accountant, Quaid is a sexy, hip lit prof with a disintegrating marriage (to Jane Kaczmarek).

There’s no point in delving very far into the increasingly silly, ludicrous plot. It teams Quaid’s Dexter Cornell with Meg Ryan’s pert Sydney Fuller, an adoring student who soon finds herself handcuffed to Dexter via his hasty application of instant-bonding glue. If you worry that this might somehow transfer the lethal toxin to her system, just wait: Dexter, who’s supposedly undergoing a swift reappraisal of his life in the face of imminent death, actually takes the willing Sydney to bed! Talk about risk from AIDS!

The actors are blameless. Actually, Quaid is quite good: His is the right performance, one of complexity that grows from flipness to hurt and fear and then courage and determination. He shows that his growth as an actor is commensurate with his rising stardom, but he’s stuck in the wrong movie.

Ryan is wonderful at suggesting the humor and vulnerability in the sweet-natured Sydney, who’s a perfectly normal type tempted into an unexpectedly adventurous relationship with a handsome young professor.

Daniel Stern plays one of Quaid’s colleagues, and Charlotte Rampling by now holds the patent on that staple of the classy murder mystery, the icily elegant grand dame. (By the way, the 1949 “D.O.A.” is said to have been inspired by a German film and was first remade in Australia in 1969 as the blah “Color Me Dead.”)

Much is made of Cornell’s abandoning his early success as a novelist to concentrate on teaching, so much so that his wife, although she says she loves him, is divorcing him over it. Ironically, that Cornell comes across as a gifted teacher is one of the few convincing aspects of the entire film. That a successful academic career is regarded as a sell-out, a dreaded proof of failure, reveals more about the film makers and their values than it does about their characters.

The phoniness of this issue becomes emblematic of the artificiality that pervades this great-looking but hollow and foolish reworking of “D.O.A.” (rated R for considerable violence, strong language and some sex).