ABOUT TIME (Richard Curtis). 123 minutes. Opens Friday (November 1). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NN
About Time is another of Love Actually writer/director Richard Curtis’s sappy, what-a-wonderful-world romantic comedies. This one’s about a goofy Brit (Domhnall Gleeson) with the ability to travel back within his own lifetime to redo things as he sees fit who falls for a lovely American (Rachel McAdams). (You can make a fantastic first impression if you can try it over and over.)
The gimmick doesn’t affect the plot in any meaningful way, but it does give Curtis’s sappiest, cheesiest impulses free rein: when a scene goes awry, he simply starts it again and takes it in a different direction, usually with a different pop song on the soundtrack.
Gleeson and McAdams are charming, and Bill Nighy is delightful as always as Gleeson’s father, but About Time is so insistently, explicitly manipulative – and so wilfully blind to the moral implications of its hero’s actions for the lives of the people around him – that it says more about the filmmaker’s machinations than perhaps he intends.
