Just as television peaks at its height of banality, "My Own Worst Enemy" comes along and takes awful television to a completely new level. Advertised as Christian Slater's return to mainstream entertainment, the show presents Slater as a James Bond rip-off with a twist: a split personality.
The premiere episode opens with a tape of Edward, Slater's spy-assassin half, relaying a cryptic message to an as of yet unknown person. Then, the show flashes to a Russian spy hand-off and sex scene between Slater and a foxy Russian spy from the other side. Edward's mission was to bring her back to his mother ship, led by the intimidating Mavis Heller (played by Alfre Woodard).
Upon stepping into an elevator after completing his mission, Edward is then "put to sleep" and Henry Spivey is awakened, an efficiency expert with a whole different set of memories than Edward's. Henry has a beautiful wife Angie (Mädchen Amick), two children and lives a normal life in suburbia.
The action arises when Edward wakes up in Henry's life and vice versa, especially since Henry has no training as a killer. When Henry is captured by a couple of Russian sociopaths (and subsequently rescued by his best friend from work), he realizes that he has been living a lie. He is further floored by the fact that his life is not the real one; Heller reveals that Henry is a creation of Edward's psyche that they tapped into only 19 years ago.
The company that Edward works for has found a way to tap into a certain part of the brain (using many technical-sounding terms) and create a split personality. This ability protects the company from exposure when any of their agents are captured or try to sell information, but other than that, no real reason is given to explain why this procedure is useful.
Henry then has to work together with Edward when Edward decides he wants to lead a normal life rather than only being awake for work, while Henry grows bored with his suburban existence and longs for more.
In essence, this show purports to be a classic action-adventure story with a science-fiction twist. While it is almost impossible not to be sucked into the action of mindless television, Slater is definitely no Daniel Craig (or Sean Connery, or even Timothy Dalton). His impersonation of a killer is hardly satisfactory because he is not remotely intimidating, and his portrayal of Henry is boring, a performance that even the most mediocre actor could provide.
The rest of the cast's acting is solid, but there isn't much to say because Slater takes up most of the screen time. There are no subplots and no interesting characters besides the Jekyll and Hyde duo of Edward and Henry. The show also relies on a lot of action scenes with people running away from bullets in slow motion and crazy men waving guns around for no reason. There are also plenty of blood-splattering scenes and big explosions for those who like that kind of thing.
The show's problem isn't the action or the science or the fact that it rips off many beloved authors (Ian Fleming, Philip K. Dick and Robert Louis Stevenson to name a few). The problem is Christian Slater. His career took a downturn in the last 10 years for a reason, namely that he can't act. The show gives him the opportunity to play two distinctly different roles and he ultimately fails to play either one convincingly. The show poses existentialist questions about the self and reality, but Slater cannot pull off the gravity required of this role and just ends up looking silly.
