This is a very enjoyable amnesiac secret agent drama. Alec Baldwin is good at this sort of thing, and does well as the man who may or may not be who he thinks he is, or might be. He wakes up in hospital after a plane crash, and is slowly rehabilitated and treated by a woman psychiatrist for his mental trauma. Or so it seems. This is a British TV film well directed by Ben Bolt. Baldwin's acting abilities have been conspicuous ever since he played the lead in the excellent TV series DRESS GRAY (1986, see my review), which unfortunately has never been released on DVD. Here the demands placed upon him are few, because these action films generally just require a grim determination, occasional looks of puzzlement, some interplay with the female lead, getting shot at, leaping over walls, and so on, all of which happens here, of course. Here the woman psychiatrist is played by the British actress Louise Lombard, who has a nice voice and looks appropriately earnest. The villain is played by Powers Boothe, who really knows how to be quietly sinister when he wants to be. As is usual with these films, the hero has been subjected to mind-programming, an advanced form of brain-washing using high-tech techniques by means of brain probes and other ominous devices. Films have been made with actors and actresses which are then fed into his brain and false memories, which when he wakes up he believes are his genuine memories. The key moment in the film is when he sees his 'wife' appearing as a stewardess in a safety video on an airplane. He traces her and discovers that she is an actress, and not his wife at all. These stories about people not knowing who they are are intriguing, as who really knows who he or she is anyway?
Review of Second Nature
