Timeline (2003)

Directed by Richard Donner. Starring Paul Walker, Frances O’Connor, Gerard Butler, Neal McDonough, Billy Connolly, David Thewlis, Michael Sheen, Anna Friel, Matt Craven, Ethan Embry, Martin Csokas, Lambert Wilson, Rossif Sutherland. [PG-13]

Using a wormhole, a group of archaeology students go back in time to France during the Hundred Years War to save their professor (Connolly), who got himself trapped in time. Unexciting time travel yarn lacks ambition and inventiveness (there’s no awe or mystery or clever complications once they go through the wormhole), resorting instead to plugging each character into a formulaic medieval war scenario; the action is mostly monotonous and the romance is laughable. It’s not an especially involved plot at face value, and yet everything is so incoherently assembled, one should probably be taking notes to keep track of who is who and which is where and whatever for and why should anyone care. The supporting cast does what they can (not much), but the lead performances are rather awful—Walker’s grad student “bro” seems nearly as dim as the heroes of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (and with a tenth of the charm, at best), while O’Connor’s crying scene wouldn’t pass muster on a daytime soap. For Donner, a journeyman director with several top-notch entertainments under his belt, this is hopefully the nadir. During the climactic battle scene, fiendish Lord Oliver (Sheen) declares, “I’m beginning to find this rather tiresome”—heaven knows what took him so long to make that assessment.

28/100