One of the most important ingredients for the good Hitchcockian thriller is basic premise of “an ordinary man in extraordinary situation”. The extraordinary situation is exactly what the protagonist of Shattered, 1991 film written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, finds himself in. The plot, based on The Plastic Nightmare, novel by Richard Neeley, begins when the car with San Francisco architect Dan Merrick (played by Tom Berenger) and his wife Judith (played by Greta Scacchi) drives off the road. While Judith is all but unscathed, Dan ends with terrible injuries that leave him comatose and disfigured. After he wakes up, he goes to slow and complicated recovery that includes reconstructive surgery and physical therapy before he is able to return home and to the office he shares with best friend Jeb Scott (played by Corbin Bernsen). The biggest problem Dan experiences is amnesia – while otherwise intellectually functional, he can’t remember anything prior to the accident except from few confusing flashbacks. While Judith, who is apparently in love with him, tries her best to help him to adapt to new situation, her best friend and Jeb’s wife Jenny (played by Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), hints that his marriage to Judith was hardly idyllic. Dan later finds photographs of Judith having torrid affair with another man. He rehires Gus Klein (played by Bob Hoskins), eccentric private detective who had made those photographs and begins to seek the truth about what really happened to him. One of the possibilities is that the car crash wasn’t accidental and that Judith actually wanted to kill him in order to live with her lover.
German film maker Wolfgang Petersen planned to make this film for a long time, beginning to work on it even before his great 1981 hit Das Boot. A decade later, already established in Hollywood, he envisioned Shattered as typical Hitchcockian thriller which uses protagonist’s amnesia as a way to turn ordinary protagonist into detective and make his seemingly ordinary life into intriguing mystery. Petersen enhances formula with stylish direction, use of San Francisco locations that had served Hitchock so well, as well as melodramatic but very effective music score by Alan Silvestri. Another great asset of the film is Greta Scacchi, an actress who can play femme fatale very well, and who not only makes true motives and intentions of her character look indecipherable, but also adds strong erotic dimension to the film, which, like so many Hollywood thrillers made at the time, has steamy love scenes. Tom Berenger is, despite playing character with affliction, is bland in comparison with Scacchi. The best acting performance is, however, provided by Bob Hoskins, great character actor who makes his comic relief role quite memorable. The best remembered thing about Shattered is the great plot twist which, depending on the mood or various criteria, can be seen as brilliant or too preposterous to be taken seriously. In any case, once it happens, Petersen doesn’t seem to know what to do with it and provides somewhat rushed and over-melodramatic finale, further damaged with less than plausible detail in the epilogue. Petersen, on the other hand, keeps strong tempo and makes Shattered relatively short and easily digestible. In the end, despite its flaws, Shattered is good example of Hitchcockian thriller that could be recommended even to those who aren’t fans of the genre.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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