Slippery Time-Travel Conundrum.

Rating: 4/10 (6 October 2007)

I have a feeling there is a lot of substance in this film. I wish I could say I got it, but I didn't. Maybe I glanced away from the screen too often or something. The story seemed to meander around through time and space and maybe one or two other dimensions known only to the director, Terry Gilliam. (By the way, it's anything but funny.)
Bruce Willis is sent back from the future, as in "The Terminator," but without any ability to alter the future, only the capacity to learn from the past and report back to the future world in which he originated. (Got that? Good.) On one of his first, mis-directed trips, he winds up in 1990 being treated by psychiatrist Madeleine Stowe, whom I would have been pleased to treat me, even if only for a hangnail. Brad Pitt shows up as a super-animated fellow patient. Willis is somehow jerked into 1996, where he again runs into Stowe and this time kidnaps her as a kind of living tourist guide.
I kept watching what seemed to me to be a pretty slipshod and ill thought-out movie because the acting is rather good. Bruce Willis, whatever else he may be, is no narcissist. He's made to be dumpy, shaved bald, tattooed, and dressed like a homeless bag man. (Everyone else seems to dress in rags too. The fashion seems to fit the physical milieu in which everything, whatever the time period, is broken, jagged, wet, and made out of junk -- even the scientific laboratories.) Stowe doesn't have to act much to be magnetic but she fits the role alright. Brad Pitt is a manic loony and puts more into it than he has in some other roles.
I said before that it wasn't a comedy. But it's more than just not a comedy. It's tragic, as I suppose it's armature is supposed to be. Why else the allusions to "Vertigo"?