The Big Twist

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

D.O.A.

A man walks into a police station and says he wants to report a murder. Whose? the desk sergeant asks. Mine, the chap replies.

Possibly there are some movie cultists who still have glowing memories of the original 1949 version of D.O.A., but even they may find this remake engaging. Screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue, who recently updated The Fly, has a gift for polishing up pop cultural artifacts so that they shine like new. And Directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, up from rock videos and Max Headroom, have found their own effective approximation of the beloved film noir style.

The hero, here renamed Dexter Cornell (Dennis Quaid, charming even unto death), is determined not to go gentle into that good night. He will devote his final hours to finding out who slipped him slow-acting but irreversible poison. But Cornell is no longer an accountant. He is a blocked novelist, cynically teaching college lit. The new twist is that Cornell's death, not to mention several others, is motivated not by the usual lusts (money, sex, power) but by dark literary passions. How far we have come from 1949, when it was a boring old iridium shipment that set everyone's wheels spinning. How acute of D.O.A.'s creators to realize that in today's culturally aspiring America there probably are people who would kill to write a few immortal sentences.