Source Code (2011)

Gawd, maybe I should change the name of this blog to 'My Year with Cyber-Techno-Fantasy Thriller dealies' - we've had The Adjustment Bureau, Limitless, Sucker Punch, that post where I mainly talked about Inception when i should have been talking about something else... A lot of big broad sci-fi. Filmmakers seem to be quite interested in these high concept film about now and that's fine with me. Pure sci-fi bores me. This Bradbury/Matheson/Dick-style stuff really captures my imagination. Source Code is no different. It's about a soldier who goes back to a parallel version of the past (not the actual 'real' one) for 8mins to find out who the terrorist is and he has to repeat it until he comes up with the answer. So far so Philip K. Dick. It's like Quantum Leap meets Groundhog Day meets Hitchcock. Do professional critics make money from the one line reviews on movie posters?.. cos I can do them all day long.
I do imagine that if Hitch had made more technological thrillers, they would look like this. It's got a charismatic leading man, a charming leading lady, bombs, um... a train-He would have loved this.
Now I like Source Code and everything and... It works as a time-travel thingy but there's a niggles for me in the film and as much as these types of films are prone to having them, sometimes you can ignore them and sometimes you can't. Some people struggle with Inception because they don't understand how the technology works. My deal with Source Code is that the soldier,  played by Jake Gyllenhall, isn't pragmatic enough in finding the terrorist. For me, that is. If he was that efficient, then the movie's be 30mins long and would be short on characters and story. Stuff like that. But as i always say, I'm not in control of how I perceive things. Don't judge my irrational perceptions.
That my negative bit over. This movie is so finely edited it seems effortless. It never takes a break, never slows down but it never gets too convoluted either. Gyllenhall is good and I'm preparing to forgive him for Love And Other Drugs; as is Michelle Monoghan, Vera Carnival and the Teflon don of acting, Jeffrey Wright (he's unsullied by whatever tut he's been in). He's like the black Alec Guinness. He can do anything from play Colin Lowell to Jean-Michelle Basquiat to Muddy Waters. Sadly he doesn't have much to do here but I'm always happy to see him.
I think the best thing about this film for me is it has the strong emotional core that Duncan Jones previous and debut movie, Moon, lacked. Yeah, Moon is good and original and worthwhile but it was too remote for me to connect with. If you argued that was the point, I'd throw my hands up and say 'Fair enough' but I didn't feel that about this film and that represents progress to me. I also like that the terrorist is revealed at the end of the 2nd act instead of the end because it gives the film more time to play with the device and the quantum mechanics at play. Admittedly, the super happy ending is a smudge wide of the mark (what would Phillip K. Dick say?) but Source Code is very well made and it's hustle is too hard to knock.

I watched Source Code (2011)  at the cinema.
My 2011 in Movies will return with Killing Bono (2011)...