Source Code Review

• 28th Mar 2011

Fans of brain bending science fiction ideas are in “Hog’s Heaven” right now. Last year Inception did its business in dreams; this year we have already had The Adjustment Bureau which toyed with fate; and now we have Source Code which takes us from the future back to the last 8 minutes of a man’s life before he is killed in an explosion aboard a train. The twist is that it is someone else who takes control of his body in order to relive these last 8 minutes over and over in order to figure out what happened.

Once you have accepted the implausibility of this it’s a gripping little drama that in fact spends most of its time focussing on the character drama aspects of this scenario.  If you are just expecting a rollercoaster of a whodunit mystery – then forget it.  While this is more the maguffin of the story, we spend most of our time with our hero trying to figure out what has happened to him. It’s quite touching story that we are told but with plenty of thrills and laughs thrown into the mix for good measure.

Jake Gyllenhaal is fast becoming a leading man worth putting your bucks into. Maybe with a little less Price of Persia he might actually go for a score record that is fairly tarnish-free. Michele Monahan, at first, you’d like to lash out against as her initial line of dialogue could well be one that would annoy (as we have to listen to it time and time again) but thankfully the skills of editing for pace distract us from it later into the film. Verga Farmiga spends most of her time gawping at the screen uncomfortably while she takes orders from a wonderfully awkward Jeffrey Wright (seriously, one of our better character actors).

Duncan Jones could have set this anywhere, but placing it on a train adds urgency to the setting, which was sadly lacking in Unstoppable. This is a director who is set to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Nolan as an intelligent story teller who can take farfetched ideas and turn them into engrossing mainstream cinema. Michael Bay – your time is over, please step aside. The new kids on the block are here to show you how to entertain the masses and make the money at the same time!

Steven Hurst