Rating: C+
Dir: Duncan Jones
Star: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright
A man (Gyllenhaal) wakes up on a train. The unknown girl opposite (Monaghan) knows who he is, but calls him by a different name. As he tries to figure out what’s going on, the train is destroyed, blown up by a terrorist bomb. The man finds himself inside a pod, being addressed by an Air Force officer (Farmiga): turns out he is former helicopter pilot Colter Stevens, and is embedded in a military project which allows a user to experience an eight-minute chunk of another’s life. His mission – and he doesn’t have much choice as to whether to accept it – is to find out who on the train is responsible, and stop them, not only from blowing it up, but from executing the larger, nastier terrorist attack they have planned as a follow-up.
Stevens will be repeating the same eight-minute chunk, with variations, until the case is solved. He also discovers the nasty truth about the project: that he was all but killed in a Afghani ‘copter crash, leaving his body on life support, and the pod is a construct of his mind to handle the situation. This kind of thing has been done before, and this is particularly close to Deja Vu in story. The script also occupies a tricky, and ultimately unsatisfying, middle-ground, neither offering a convincing explanation for the time-travel and its mechanics, nor failing to bother with one – either would likely have been preferable.
That particularly weakens things at the end, where the previous rules appear to be discarded, for the sake of a convenient loophole through which the film saunters, in order to fulfill its date with Hollywood convention. However, if you don’t peer too close, this still delivers passable entertainment, with a set of decent performances. Those are led by Gyllenhaal, who makes an engaging hero, uncovering what’s going on, as the audience does: there’s nothing hidden from us which isn’t hidden from him. That helps bring the audience in, and distract them from the holes in the plot. Jones – whom I didn’t realize was David Bowie’s son – has made something here which is a little smarter than the average Hollywood popcorn flick. However, it’s definitely not as clever as it thinks it is.