I Want to Go Back in Time to Not Watch This

Rating: 2/10 (30 April 2019)

See, this is why I shouldn't just play a movie on Netflix without researching it a bit. Had I done my homework, I would've known that "About Time" was made by the same nitwit behind "Love, Actually" (2003), a movie which is awful, actually. Perhaps, I could've foreseen that, no, this will not be a clever narrative about time travel; it will ruin the fun of it, actually, and all for the sake of sophomoric sentimentality. Movie rom-com love is a powerful force, I will grant you--it can crush all love and intelligence from just about anything, and Richard Curtis seems to be out to prove that.
It should go without saying that the time travel here is nonsensical and breaks nearly every rule it establishes in the first place and invents new ones along the way for plot convenience, or that it's entirely self-centered for the happiness of the creepy hero (no superhero antics for this supernatural egoist; he's content to manipulate the unsuspecting lives of those around him for his own benefit). Even the mixing of time travel with a silly movie romance isn't original (in fact, Rachel McAdams had already starred in another one, "The Time Traveler's Wife" (2009)), but, then, nothing here is original. This is the same cookie-cutter trifle full of clichÃ©s and stock characters offered to movie-goers over and over again.
Oh, and how condescending to have these moneyed filmmakers with their budgets and revenues of millions of dollars preach to us about money being "a mixed bag," as the father character claims. Sure, better to drown our minds in lovey-dovey sap at the price of a ticket by watching millionaires tell us what's important in life. Let's trade each other our mixed bags of money, then tell me what's important in life, actually.