Dead Again is overblown and silly, which makes it a good fit for director Kenneth Branagh. There’s amnesia and past lives, characters who stutter and characters who whistle through their teeth, and unhealthy obsessions with cigarettes and scissors. It’s the kind of clever, slightly preposterous script a talented writer would sell early in their career and cringe over later. (The writer in this case is Scott Frank, whose credits include Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Logan.) Branagh turns most of the negatives into positives with a suitable style, a banging score and actors too talented for schlock like this. The end result is a lot of fun.
Branagh stars with a solid American accent alongside Emma Thompson, whose eyes have never been called on to be more expressive. They hold the center with good friend (and great actor) Derek Jacobi. Together they put this story over just fine. Something new I noticed on this watch was suggestions that people from the present were also in the past, perhaps not playing themselves. Some of the supporting cast play dual roles and some dialogue spoken by an actor in the present is repeated by a different actor in the past.
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