BEFORE: Just two weeks to go now until I start my Doc Block, then I'll be on docs for a month and a half - really, a lot can go wrong in a month and a half, all it takes is one person NOT being in a movie but also appearing in the IMDB cast list to throw me off. But I've got back-up connections a lot of the time, and I've been very careful about placing the docs in a very specific order to minimize the risk. Two iterations ago the documentary list was a little higgledy-piggledy, the order made sense to me but with regards to subject matter it kind of zigzagged all over the place. With the most recent additions some things needed to move around, and I think that kind of helped make it more organized, now it starts on actors, moves to politics, a quick stop on sports before moving over to rock music, then after a detour to animators and illustrators it's on to comedians, I'll wrap up with a mixed bag of a reality star, a newscaster, a film director and a film composer. I hesitate to say that it's the "best" line-up I could put together, but now I think it makes sense both internally and externally.
(If any film festival organizers are paying attention, I am available for hire....that's the dream job, anyway)
John Hutcherson carries over from "Five Nights at Freddy's".
THE PLOT: When a tech blogger lands an interview with a tech guru and stops an attack on him, he finds a mysterious ring that takes him back 57 seconds into the past.
AFTER: I'm chipping away at the time travel movies, but it is not easy, they can be very difficult to link to. I've been trying to get to the sequels to "The Butterfly Effect" for over a decade, there's just no carry-over between them, and even treating them like horror movies wouldn't help at this point - if a film links to one "Final Destination" film and one "Saw" film, that's just not going to do it. I lucked out and one of my romance films this year turned out to be a time-travel film (umm, I think) but I'm not telling you which one, because the film didn't lead with that, and no spoilers. Then there's "Paradox", "Synchronicity", "Time Cut", "Omni Loop" and four or give others, I may have to design a chain specifically for the purpose of linking these together if I want to get them watched.
But that's a problem for another day - "57 Seconds" is a time travel film set in the world of billionaire tech moguls and pharmaceutical companies, two CEOs are at war with each other because one single-handedly created the opioid crisis that killed Franklin's sister, and the other wants to solve America's health problems by selling everyone a metal arm-band, kind of like a FitBit only it somehow makes you want to eat right and exercise more, but no, it's not mind control or anything like that except somehow it probably is. Even if it's just tracking your fitness level and caloric intake and blood sugar level and transmitting that data to some kind of central server, isn't that bad enough?
Anton Burrell (aka the "good" CEO) wants to make everyone healthier, while of course collecting all their sweet, sweet data points, but what about accidents? People can still die in car crashes, plane crashes, freak skateboard accidents, but he's got a plan for that too, because the next generation of the Tri-Bands are going to use quantum crystals to stop accidents before they happen, or rather right after, by making sure they then DIDN'T happen. Gee, that sounds a lot like rewinding time, or how Nicolas Cage could look one minute into the future in the movie "Next" and then quickly change what was about to happen. It makes sense, Josh Hutcherson's film yesterday echoed the Nic Cage film "Willy's Wonderland" and now this, so probably he's planning to appear next in a film where he has to steal the U.S. Constitution from the National Archives because it has a treasure map on it.
After saving Burrell from an assassin, tech blogger Franklin secures an interview with him, but also finds a strange ring on the floor after, which he soon learns can send him 57 seconds back into the past, which is really just enough time to fix one mistake, at least most of the time. But with repeated uses (thankfully the ring doesn't take 7 minutes to recharge) he can test many different ways to solve a problem, and only keep the one that worked. Somehow this tiny ring effects all time everywhere in the universe, and of course scientifically that's impossible, because of, you know, the continuum of space-time, at best it would only be able to create a localized time fluctuation that would radiate out from him at the central point, but it would take minutes to reach out and affect time across the planet, and who knows, perhaps repeated uses would poke some kind of hole in the fabric of the universe, and well, that's probably not good.
Franklin definitely heard Burrell talk about "quantum crystals" during that interview, but he never really puts two and two together here and figures out that it's Burrell's ring - because then he'd have to give it back, and he's having too much fun winning casino games and testing out sex moves on his girlfriend, much like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day" when he robs the armored car and tries to impress Andie MacDowell. Sure, that's basic human nature, right, what can time travel do FOR ME? But eventually once he's got the money and the girl, he sets his sights on the Big Pharma exec who killed his sister.
Sig Thorensen (aka the "Bad" CEO) offers Franklin a job once he sees how "lucky" he is at the casino - sure, because the pharma companies often recruit from casino footage, right? If he can win roulette four times in a row, surely he can write some positive articles on the web about the company that made addictive painkillers (?). Franklin takes the job so he can bring the company down from the inside, but after a couple months his girlfriend is wondering about his motives. Well, sure, she still thinks he's making money from the job, because Franklin hasn't clued her in about the time travel ring. If she knew he used the ring to make her fall in love with him, would she still love him? I guess we'll never know.
Once Franklin finally has the dirt on Thorensen, and makes it public on the Jumbotron at a sporting event (this also makes no sense) the CEO takes off in his private jet, with Franklin along for the ride. The ring turns out to be pretty useless when the plane's about to crash, because it can only rewind 57 seconds and the plane ride is much longer than that. Whoopsie.
The ending is somewhat reminiscent of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", and the ring is like the everlasting gobstopper. Franklin should have given it back to Burrell when he had the chance, in other words. Now he doesn't get to run the chocolate factory, but, well, it turns out he doesn't even want to. Time travel turns out to be just as addictive as painkillers, which I think is some kind of a mixed metaphor, but I guess we'll never really know that for sure either. There's so much here that never gets explained properly, like who is that weird guy in the hood, and WHY is that weird guy in the hood. If he's a precog, then why do we even need the time travel ring?
Directed by Rusty Cundieff (one of the directors of "Movie 43")
Also starring Morgan Freeman (last heard in "Conan the Barbarian" (2011)), Greg Germann (last seen in "Sweet November"), Lovie Simone (last seen in "Monster"), Bevin Bru, Sammi Rotibi (last seen in "The Forever Purge"), Mark Jacobson, Griff Furst (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), D.A. Obahor (last seen in "The Starling"), Jeff Chase (last seen in "Transporter 2"), Aaron Jay Rome (last seen in "The Dirt"), Marcus Lyle Brown (last seen in "Eve's Bayou"), Kenneth Kynt Bryan (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), Lucius Baston (last seen in "Ride Along 2"), Matthew Jayson Cwern, Mary Drew Ahrens, Valerie Lamb, Thomas P. Vitale, Rusty Cundieff, Jaida Standberry, Daniel Louis Rivas (last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), Robert Tre Francis, Gage Nelson
RATING: 4 out of 10 police cars on the runway
No comments:
Post a Comment