This movie sounds so uninteresting and tedious I haven’t got around to seeing it. Someday I probably will but just can’t be bothered atm.
It’s bad. The main actor can’t act and swallows all his dialogue. He looks as comfortable on camera as a dog wearing a sweater, or a dog being made to walk on its hind legs. Part of the problem is every scene up to the halfway point is truncated by aggressive editing, getting out of every scene early with no transition. It feels like a montage the first 30 or so minutes, and then it eases up a little and some scenes actually play out to a "normal" length. You don’t care about anybody or anything they’re talking about. Then every time they advance the plot, they jump around to new locations while someone is talking so you can’t tell if it’s a memory or a jump forward in time, which might be the point, but it makes viewing a chore.
There are no scene transitions either. At one point Washington and Neil are hatching a plan, W says they need at least 4 vehicles faster than they look, one has to be a fire truck, and it all has to be cash . They cut to Neil, then back to W and
it’s already happened. Can’t tell if this is supposed to be part of the time inversion theme or just wacky editing. Like, there is no visual cue that weeks have passed.
Seeing Michael Caine reminds the viewer what acting is supposed to be, or at least what a naturalistic style is, someone who looks comfortable on camera. JD Washington has zero of daddy’s charisma, and most of his scenes he delivers his lines like he's reading them from cue cards just off camera. Robert Pattinson sounds like a douchebag with his English (normal?) accent. There was absolutely not a shred of heat between Washington and the long-necked woman (Kat?), but I think you’re supposed to believe Washington is willing to botch the mission to save the world so he can save her — but she shows zero interest in him. There’s actually more unrequited passion between Washington and Pattinson. Casting was shite. I wonder if Cillian or Leo or Bale or some of the other Chris Nolan Players were supposed to be in this?
I bet if you were a glutton for punishment and watched this thing 5 or 6 times it would suddenly burst open dramatically and all make sense. Instead, it’s almost impossible to tell where they are, why they are going to these far flung locales (India, Ukraine, Estonia et al.), or even when they are going anywhere. Everything happens by instantaneous teleportation.
I put this on last night for my daughter, and she was laughing in so many places it made we wonder if this thing was a comedy. At one point, the giraffe woman is laying there on a gurney, needing to go through a "turnstile" to invert time, and daughter says, "why is she still here? What is she doing in this part of the movie? Go home!"
What is the plot? There is a device that resembles a cam shaft out of a diesel motor, and it can dissemble into 9 pieces that are each held by the 9 countries with nuclear weapons. The cam shaft is a physical manifestation of an algorithm that reverses the flow of time. I think they explain that Kenneth Branagh touched some radioactive material as a teenager and discovered anything that came into contact with it moves backwards through time. "Inverted time". Why? Who knows. Who cares. It goes from interesting to laugh out loud stupid with regularity. Seeing him "catch" bullets with a gun (instead of firing them) is among the silliest things in a movie crammed full of silly things. Second silliest is snow falling because something exploded (because negative heat entropy).
Part of the appeal must have been the sleight of hand and camera tricks to make half the action play in reverse in the same frame as normal motion action. Mapping out the effects must have been a real headache. I wonder if it was supposed to be mind blowing? It’s not. Mostly it just makes no fecking sense whatsoever. The Protagonist is a super CIA agent brought into this conspiracy, the gnarliest secret ever, exponentially more dangerous than the Manhattan Project, and then we see about 100 run of the mill army grunts taking part in a battle where half their opponents are doing everything in reverse, and all 100 of them are never going to talk about their mission.
And Kenneth Branagh does another ridiculously shitty accent.
3/10
