Hollywood recycles

Rating: 1/10 (7 May 2011)

Source Code has a powerful trailer, setting up some intriguing questions to be answered and hinting at three plots: inside the virtual reality, outside it, and an interplay between these two that should solve some crucial points. Unfortunately, the film itself contains absolutely nothing that isn't already in the trailer. I saw the film with my wife. She fell asleep in the middle, woke up half an hour later and asked me "was he on the train again?" to which I answered "several times". "What did I miss?" "Absolutely nothing." The whole movie is an exercise in wasting time by a screen-writer whose ideas ran out shortly after he thought up a great trailer (read: sales pitch. I can almost hear it: "Inception meets Groundhog Day, and all happening entirely inside the Inner Space capsule!". Unfortunately, other than recycling from the exceedingly overdone "virtual reality" movie genre, this film has nothing). There is only one plot: "whodunit?", and that plot progresses nowhere, and is finished when the question is answered by the first candidate the audience suspects, but the last the protagonist bothers checking. The ending of the movie, on the other hand, is so bad I dare not even blame the poor screenwriter. It must have been the work of a focus group. Whatever its source, it is lame and unconvincing. Do not expect any of the questions posed by the trailer to be answered. They are not.
I see this movie as an homage to Quantum Leap. The classic "stranger in the mirror" scene is featured, and even Scott Bakula is called in to deliver his famous "Oh, boy". (The scene where this happens is, itself, a testament to the emotional inconsistency of the film: the last thing the hero does is the one thing he keeps telling everybody he wants to do.)
My verdict: Quantum Leap deserves so much better than this.