A certain feeling of déjà-vu...

Rating: 6/10 (5 April 2020)

Jake Gyllenhaal is quite convincing as the army captain "Colter Stevens" working on a secret military programme whereby his consciousness can be implanted into the body of another - but only for eight minutes at a time. When a bomb goes off on a commuter train he is tasked with going back - via the body of a teacher - to try and piece together what happened and apprehend the perpetrator. before it happens again. The one thing he cannot do, is prevent the explosion but as he continues to go back, time after time, he develops a fondness of a fellow passenger "Christina" (Michelle Monaghan) and so he decides to establish just what he can actually do to help save her from her fate. His operators - Jeffrey Wright and Vera Farmiga have other plans for him, though, and as that realisation sinks in he must take perilous risks to break free from his digitally induced "Groundhog Day". It does lack pace; the very repetitive style of the storytelling negates the otherwise well paced urgency of the plot, and can grate after a while - at times it seems like quite a long 90 minutes. It's conceptually quite clever, however, and worth watching.