BEFORE: I made great strides this year in getting to some movies that have been on the watchlist for a very long time, and some of those were time-travel films, like "The Butterfly Effect 2", but I'm not going to stop there, I've got two more scheduled before September ends. There are just five more time-travel films on my list now, which isn't a lot, but they're difficult to link to. Maybe I can work a few more in next year, as 2025 is booked solid.
Greg Kinnear carries over from "You Gotta Believe".
THE PLOT: A brilliant boy discovers he can manipulate time using a family heirloom. He soon teams up with his siblings in returning to the time of his parents' separation, with hope of changing the outcome.
AFTER: This plays out like a mix of "Back to the Future" and "Groundhog Day", since a kid with two siblings has to save his parents' marriage, but he does that by running the same day, the same 12-hour period, over and over. Each time he learns a bit more about how to do things, so you might imagine that with enough tries, he's bound to crack the code and get it right. But things are a bit more difficult for him because he's non-verbal and autistic or something, like he doesn't like being touched and he has to use an iPad that has the voice of Barack Obama to say things to people. I guess this is relatable to some families out there, but in no way do I believe that our current administration has "fixed" autism just by bad-mouthing Tylenol taken during pregnancy and basing this decision on zero scientific evidence.
Maybe it's just that "Groundhog Day" and "Back to the Future" are the untouchable benchmarks in this genre, they were both just done so well that it's a bit hard for any other film to measure up. "Paradox" sure wasn't going to be able to compete, no way, and now we've got this one, which, well, has a lot of heart. You still can't depend on kids to be good actors, no way, no how, and the middle child, Max, is probably the worst offender, I just couldn't believe he was sincere at any point. The kid who doesn't talk managed to do most of the heavy lifting, but his character was unbelievable in so many other ways. Within HOURS of the heirloom grandfather clock being delivered, this kid has figured out not only how to repair it as a clock, but how to restore its time-travel abilities? Umm, OK, did he just Google that somehow? Or is he just some intuitive genius that knows how a time travel clock works?
Needless to say, how does one grandfather clock in a basement turn back time 12 hours for the whole universe? Where do the clock repair skills come from? Also, do people keep aging when you reset time and re-live the same day 87 times? Is the clock powered by the Time Stone from the Infiinity Gems? Also, the clock is OLD so that means someone back in the 1940's discovered how to reset time, but didn't tell anybody about it? Did that person become a millionaire by betting on sports games or playing the stock market, or did he just use it to fix his relationships?
This is a prime example of the "Burned Toast" theory though, because the kids can only think of ways to derail their parents' announcing their separation that are destructive and not constructive. Taylor knows his mother's meeting with a possible new boyfriend, so he puts tree nuts in that guy's meal because he's allergic and then on the next replay of the day, he tries to hide the guy's epipen. Umm, this is not cool, even if the guy is a sleazebag. Later, when the kids find out about Dad's new bachelor pad, they get there first and trash the place, so in essence they keep burning that toast, again and again, hoping that will lead to more positive outcomes. Well, it kind of does, but then it doesn't.
Thankfully the parents' memory resets every time, and conveniently the kids' memories don't, or they wouldn't be able to keep refining the plan. So time travel works exactly the way it needs to work for this story to play out as it should. But finally when the kids start to get constructive and ask about what their parents first date was like, they set up that exact scenario the same day (before a reset), so even their idiot mother is able to figure out what the kids are up to.
Clearly this relationship, this family has a lot of problems, and replaying the same day over isn't going to fix them all, but the kids collaborating is a step in the right direction, and people being honest about their feelings and communicating ends up doing more than the time-travel clock, and yeah, that's probably a very good point to make. As we saw in "Back to the Future", Marty's presence in the 1950's caused more problems than it solved, at least at first. So there probably SHOULD be a learning curve with any time travel device - then I would have been OK with the kids just realizing that they can't force their parents back together and letting the chips fall where they may, because the time machine probably only has so many uses before it wears out.
NITPICK POINT: It's not clear how stealing the therapist's flowering plants suddenly makes him better at his job, this is a huge leap of logic, but I guess it's what we have to work with here.
Directed by Christian Ditter (director of "How to Be Single")
Also starring Isla Fisher (last seen in "Bachelorette"), Easton Rocket Sweda, Shay Rudolph, Mason Shea Joyce (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Ryan Guzman (last seen in "The Boy Next Door"), Arturo Castro (last seen in "The Informer"), Alphonso McAuley (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Amir Talai (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2"), Jaden Betts (last seen in "Larry Crowne"), Sam Wasylenko, Madeline Logan, Symera Jackson, Eric Marq, Shawn Balentine, David Sheftell (last seen in "Willy's Wonderland"), Jay Martel, Mann Alfonso, Charlie Sanders (last seen in "When in Rome"), Sarah Jane MacKay, Juan Monsalvez, Bryan Billy Boone, Michael Daruler and the voices of Iman Crosson, Eric Tiede.
RATING: 6 out of 10 beignets
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