High concept at its best

Rating: 7/10 (17 May 2011)

First off, I'd just like to say I had absolutely no desire to see Duncan Jones's Source Code (2011) upon hearing of it, but since the majority of my friends are male, I've come to accept that despite the fact that I'm a film student, I don't always get to pick the flick, and I will constantly suffer through exposure to explosions, muscles, bad accents, and aggressive one- liners. However, Source Code offered none of those things (well, except for the whole explosive device on the train part of the plot) and I was pleasantly surprised to find that. In this (romantic) action-thriller, Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds himself thrown into a serious mission where he must find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train—here's the shocker. while inside the body of another man! Essentially, Colter's mind is utilized as an experiment with a new program, "Source Code," which somehow magically allows him to be in the mind of another man's body for the last eight minutes of his life— this man being a passenger/victim of the commuter bombing. This is a smart movie, or it at least comes off that way. I was so busy trying to keep up that I didn't even have time to think about whether or not certain aspects were actually plausible. I had accidentally left my diagram that lays out the development of a structured narrative involving time travel, the cerebral cortex, and existentialism in the car. My bad. But like many say, "It's just science!" Jake Gyllenhaal succeeds in this role, where other actors may have failed. He brought character to the character. Anybody can read a script out loud and call it acting, but Gyllenhaal had the perfect persona for this role. He's got a forceful attitude with a sympathetic face. Yes, this could be another macho thriller, but instead of a bulky, apathetic protagonist, we get an emotional, relatable, well-developed character. Source Code will provide you with an exciting 93 minutes of mind-bending. Sure, what you're getting is a high concept film, but it's high concept at its best.