Love Jake Gyllenhaal and loved Duncan Jones' directorial debut Moon so this should have been win-win but instead it's left me feeling a bit indifferent.
I think the main problem is that since Inception did so well there has been a great rush to bring out similar mind-bending films. First there was the Adjustment Bureau which has been described as Inception lite and now there is Source Code.
The spin on the head-invasion* plot for this is Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up inside someone else's body and discovers he's on a mission to stop a bomber on a train before he detonates. He has eight minutes but every time he fails he gets reset back to the point at which he started. Inception meets Groundhog Day I suppose.
It's a nice idea but there a certain dampening of the thrill and suspense when you know that despite being blown up, he'll be able to come back and have another go.
But then the script doesn't shy away from Hollywood cliche either. I'm not spoiling anything by writing this, it's in the trailer, but I did groan:
"If you had 8 minutes to live what would you do with it?"
"I'd make every second count"
Cue kiss.
What is interesting is Colter's back story and there is a great twist. There is also one particular heart-tugging scene which demonstrate Gyllenhaal's acting ability over an above anything else he does in the film. But it isn't enough to make it a stand out film.
Overall it's entertaining enough, I guess I'm just disappointed that Duncan Jones seems to have, so early in his career, succumbed to the Hollywood machine.
I'm going to give it 59% and for some reason the critics seem to be lapping it up with an aggregated rating of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes from 191 reviews. It's gets 87% positive from visitors to the site. Metacritic gives it 74% based on 41 reviews and an average user rating of 7.9/10
* And no I didn't get the explanation of how they did it and if I think about that side of the film it raises way too many questions so decided best just to accept and move on.
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