"Maybe the human race deserves to be wiped out."

Rating: 8/10 (8 November 2017)

I approached this picture with some trepidation, as I caught Bruce Willis in "The Fifth Element" some years ago and wasn't impressed by that sci-fi story at all. This one I thought was pretty well done considering the time travel aspect involved, something that can usually make your head spin but in this film you could keep track of things if you paid attention. A neat thing I learned coming out of the picture was the definition of a Cassandra complex, a psychological phenomenon in which someone's accurate prediction of a crisis is ignored or dismissed. How often do we hear after the fact that someone had a premonition of an earthquake or a plane crash and decided to change their plans? Kind of spooky.
This was a bit of a different kind of role for Bruce Willis. He wasn't called on for those smug looks he's known for and he wasn't a hot shot who had all the answers. As good as he was though, you have to hand it to Brad Pitt for his manic portrayal of mental patient Jeffrey Goines. I've thought about it for a while now, and if I ever had the opportunity to appear in a movie, it would be as the kind of character Pitt role-modeled here. I thought he was a little over the top at times, but again, he was a mental patient, or shall we use James Cole's (Willis) definition - mentally divergent.
Following the story along in it's non-linear approach wasn't too difficult, but there were a couple of things that didn't pass muster for this viewer. A romantic involvement between Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) and Cole? I don't care how much they might have gone through, that was just too far fetched for me. Also, there's no way one can make the case for Young Cole and the Bruce Willis Cole to exist in the same time and place. I know, it happened in "Back to the Future" too, but I'm not buying it.
Still, I enjoyed the twists that popped up in the movie and the dystopian feel of the picture's setting didn't intrude on the story. It could be I caught this one in just the right frame of mind to find it entertaining, enough so I might give "The Fifth Element" another try. Oh yeah, I got a big kick out of a Bruce Willis line in the story when he said to Kathryn Railly - "All I see are dead people". I would never have guessed that "The Sixth Sense" came out four years after this one.