Groundhog Day Without the Funny

Rating: 3/10 (10 June 2013)

Source code is not bad enough to be funny, it's just pointless. I'm sure the script looked good to somebody's rich uncle looking for a tax write off. It could have been worth half watching over the Internet except Russell Peters ruins it. It could have been improved with some cowboys on spaceships with lots of slave girls. But Source Code is no The Purge. Visually it's dark and unappealing. Nothing to titillate or arouse here. The music is overly dramatic to no apparent purpose. The blatant product placements are great, but the ads before the movie have more of those, framed better, without the annoying people playing amateur actor in between. Source Code tries hard to trick and mislead you, like Agatha Cristie could. Sadly it fails, and given the rest of the elements, you don't even care that it fails. I really did watch this all the way to the end, just in case it turned into a different movie half way, or the protagonist started claiming "I see dead people." There are plenty of Philip K. Dick stories that haven't been remade into movies often enough yet, so no excuse not to have a decent story to work from, even for giving such a shoddy treatment as this. Buy this one from the delete bin, as a present for some relative you don't like. But make sure to get it in some old format you know they can't play.