Second Skin
Second Skin
R | 22 December 2000 (USA)
Second Skin Trailers

A man opens a small-town bookstore in order to escape his connections to a mobster, but is reluctantly drawn back to his dark past by a mysterious woman.

Reviews
ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.
Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.
Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.
Allissa .Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
groggo This movie is not only bad, it's sad. It doesn't really deserve a review, but its silly pretentiousness calls out for some kind of response .The dialogue is so bad it's laughable, it has cardboard characters with cardboard acting, and, to remind you that you're looking at full-bore noir, it's loaded with clichés (a slinky femme fatale, thunder and lightning, a lot of rain, dark clubs, moody music, hookers, obvious villains with faces shaded in menacing darkness throughout; the list goes on). It has characters named Tommy Gunn (a gruesomely tattooed, gum-thwacking bad guy; see Richard Widmark, 1947, Kiss of Death), Sam (as in Spade, a sort of good guy), Gutman (as in Sydney Greenstreet's character in The Maltete Falcon), and Crystal Ball.Scriptwriter John Lau and director Darrell Roodt, in other words, seem to be having fun with 1940s-style noir films. Unfortunately, we don't get to share in the fun. It's an unintentionally hilarious flick because it plays it dead-straight from start to finish. (Sample dialogue: 'Cherchez la femme'. 'What's that?' 'It's French'. One of the most famous phrases in the French language, and the femme fatale has never heard of it. Jeez.)As parody, this might have been at least tolerable; when played straight it's screaming for ridicule. There's a twist at the end, and you don't see it coming, and how could you? The 'other' woman who gives it the twist appears in the film without any context, so the viewer is left befuddled by the ending more than shocked, which is what noir audiences in the 1940s used to be when they saw similar kinds of stuff.Noir directors in the '40s-early '50s (e.g. Samuel Fuller, Henry Hathaway, Jules Dassin) made some excellent (and very cheap) films, and they did them with style, good pacing, and believable dialogue. And they didn't have the luxury of sexual situations and famous four-letter words that saturate this pile of tripe, which apparently cost something like $3.5 million (not a lot these days, but still...) to make. The leftish Dassin, for one, is shouting from somewhere in Europe, where he's been cloistered since the witch-hunts of the 1950s. You could feed a lot of hungry people with $3.5 million, I can hear him saying.This film is laughable, and doesn't intend to be. Ultimately, that's why it's so sad.
halopes I caught this movie on TV after watching a rather suspicious promotional trailer. The first scene with the sensual Natasha Henstridge dressed in a semi-transparent white dress hooked me and I decided to give the movie a try.The first half of Second Skin is pretty tolerable. I felt I was watching a fair and honest low budget noir picture, certainly moving toward some major twists. But I could never expect the plot could become so flawed and the second half of the movie could become so lame and dreary.This predictable, cliché-ridden movie could have been interesting. The music and the photography create a nice, moody atmosphere. Henstridge is, well... sensual as the femme-fatale, and MacFadyen is ok as the guy running from his past. Even though I don't like the way some scenes are cut, the real problem is the plot which turns out to be some kind of mess in the second half of the movie.After the 90 minutes of Second Skin it's frustrating to realize probably nothing will linger in your memory apart from the beauty of Henstridge.
Alex-372 The problem with this movie is the leaden touch of Darrell Roodt.Pretty photography and an absolutely gorgeous lead babe can't hide the fact that there is no plot, that the girl is getting involved with a guy who has the charisma of a rotting potato and that by the time you get to the mystery, you've really stopped caring.The movie _slowly_ meanders from one cliche to the next. Guy without a past runs a bookstore without clientele, when a beautiful babe comes in and spouts a number of tacky cliches. Then, in the mother of all plot devices, she walks out the store and _gets hit by a car_ so she can "lose her memory".Who cares? I don't. A waste of money.
George Parker "Second Skin" bets everything on a hot babe, a scenic local, a handful of decent actors, a weak story and loses. Henstridge bumps her head, loses her memory, falls for some guy, gets her memory back and remember she's supposed to kill him. The story waxes somewhat more convoluted but lacks character depth and gives us little reason to care. Camera work is artsy for artsy's sake...nice try but no cigar. Fonda is unconvincing as the ultimate heavy, etc. Overall, this flick is a stylish loser not worth the time.