Uninspired, half-baked thriller left me clock watching

Rating: 5/10 (2 April 2011)

A tired movie begets a tired movie review.
Look, I just left this film feeling like somewhere, some tiny speck of original thought crept into the screenwriter's head when he was writing this movie: The film does make the audience think. A brain puzzle in the same vein as the (much) superior "Inception", this film just constantly reminds the viewer how we are in the hands of mediocre talents who are too lazy to see an idea through and rely upon tired concepts to caulk together a story.
There is no need to poke holes in the pseudo-science surrounding the out-of-body concept employed in Source Code; it is immediately self- contradictory as our protagonist wanders into areas (train station, other train cars) that his host never did and therefore could not have known for Colter to experience. Unlike Inception, which doggedly follows its own rules of dreams, the world of this film writes, breaks, and re-writes the rules.
But this really isn't the biggest problem with the movie. The biggest problem is the ridiculous and ham-fisted approach Colter takes to finding the bomber. He thuggishly roughs up a variety of passengers, wasting the viewer's time with red herring after red herring. Our director wastes a golden opportunity to weave one hell of a whodunit and instead spends precious time trying to develop a love story nobody gives a hoot about.
I do not feel that I know anything more about these characters at the end of the film as I do at the beginning and I certainly don't care about them any more either. What could have been the emotional high point of the film, a phone call that Colter places to his father, is handled so poorly that I threw in the towel and just waited for the lights to come on.