***This review contains important spoilers***
Okay, pop quiz! In front of you is a template for a potentially solid yet excruciatingly pedestrian murder-mystery-revenge-thriller crippled with third act problems. How do you go about fixing it? Your choices: a) deepen characterization - make your hero easier to empathize with so that we care what happens to him. b) strengthen the conflict - give the characters more dramatic choices that compel us to find out what happens next. c) hang the whole thing on a ludicrous time travel scenario that you can't even be bothered to ensure makes a hint of sense anyway. If you chose c) then you're in for a real treat! Everybody else should just put down the Blu-ray and back away slowly towards the nearest exit.
Wow, Cuba. That "Show me the money!" shit sure seems an age ago now, doesn't it? Post-Jerry Maguire the one-time next-big-thing has wandered the kind of post-Oscar career wilderness typically reserved for young ladies unfortunate enough to be named Best Actress. Here he's on the verge of tears as the dull as dishwater investigative reporter, Lewis Hicks, inexplicably drawn to a series of gruesome murders, the perpetrator of which only he has witnessed. As serial killer movie convention dictates, Hicks refuses to stand idly by while the police do their thing, and armed with the killer's cryptic journal he sets about tracking him down before he strikes again.
Only, this is a mystery with no mystery, with the killer's identity revealed almost immediately. With that out of the way all that is left is the motivation, which has more holes than a sack of wiffle balls. You see, the thing about really good time travel movies is that they have a way of looping back around on themselves, with the compelled protagonist ultimately doomed to cause the very events they're so desperate to prevent. Here Hicks simply enables a threadbare plot by implicating himself through a series of increasingly moronic decisions; such as withholding vital evidence, showing up at crimes scenes for no good reason, and handling murder weapons while screaming at the top of his lungs about vanishing psychopaths.
McDonough really does nothing to help, looking beyond bored as he offers up a bad guy so bland he belongs in one of Roger Moore's Bond movie. Poor writing is the real villain here, as it's hard to care about a guy apparently capable of piecing together that the nutcase stalking the neighborhood is an actual time traveler, but too dim to realize that the simplest way out of this surrealist nightmare of pre-destination he is seemingly trapped inside is to just choose to stop doing what he is doing at any point in time. And the deus ex machina climax, just one small step removed from 'Oh it was all a dream' is just loathsome.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
None are included.
"Ticking Clock" is on sale January 4, 2011 and is rated R. Thriller. Directed by Ernie Barbarash. Written by John Turman. Starring Cuba Gooding Jr, Neal McDonough, Austin Abrams, Yancey Arias, Danielle Nicolet, Dane Rhodes.
