A decent thriller... until the last 10 minutes

Rating: 3/10 (7 August 2011)

Source Code is a strange movie. It's not really a whodunit, it's not really a sci-fi flick, and it's not really a love story either.
The whodunit part was merely filler - the mystery is solved after the very first steps. Where is the bomb? Is it here? Oh.. it was. Well, who's the villain then? Is it, perhaps, this guy? It was? Uh, okay.
The love story is equally unconvincing. Remember, we're talking about a romance that develops a total of eight minutes. There's no real reason for them to fall in love either. Colter apparently started liking her just because they sat opposite to each other. The love story is thus also a sideshow.
The sci-fi parts are unconvincing and worse, illogical. If Colter is viewing another man's experiences, wouldn't he only know what the man also knew? How can he step outside the train? The "Source Code" itself is explained shruggingly through "quantum mechanics". You know, sciency stuff. Also, computers. Cue sci-fi fans rolling their eyes.
If you can suspend disbelief enough and somehow look past the glaring plot holes, Source Code could have been an average 7/10-star sci-fi thriller.. if not for the bizarre ending. In the last 10 minutes, all of the logic and rules that the movie has been building up so far get completely thrown out the window for no good reason whatsoever.
Instead of letting Colter have his last moments of peace before an inevitable death (effectively making a point that we all must die someday, so you might as well make your last moments beautiful and worth dying for), the movie takes an absurd leap into nonsense. Apparently this ending - though beautiful and powerful - would've been too dark, so instead Colter somehow jumps to an alternate universe, where he takes over the body of another man (effectively killing him in the process, but the movie ignores this moral dilemma) and somehow nothing bad actually happened.
Somehow Colter was right all along and you *can* alter the laws and timelines of the universe with the love of an imagined 8-minute romance, and to top it all off, he sends an e-mail from his dream to a real cell phone in an alternate universe.
What point is the movie trying to make here, exactly?
Nothing makes any sense. I'm betting this movie was pre-screened to a test audience who thought the ending was too dark, so they quickly pieced together a happy ending at any cost. One that completely destroys any point and/or sense the movie was trying to make.
Without the last 10 minutes this film would've been an average 7/10. As it is now, I give it a 4/10 due to internal inconsistencies usually seen in cheap daytime TV-productions.