SOURCE CODE (Duncan Jones). See listing. Rating: NNN
Imagine a CSI episode that puts the forensic experts inside the murder they’re investigating and you’ve got a sense of Source Code, in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a soldier whose consciousness is injected into a “quantum rendering” of a terrorist attack on a Chicago-bound commuter train. Inhabiting the body of a passenger, our hero has eight minutes to figure out who planted the bomb in order to stop a second, larger strike.
It’s a grabber of a premise, and Gyllenhaal is well cast as the wide-eyed, unprepared observer trying to understand what’s happened to him (the last thing he knew, he was flying a helicopter in Afghanistan) while being forced to repeat those same eight minutes over and over. Eventually, he decides to deviate from the program and try to save the life of a fellow passenger (Michelle Monaghan), even though she’s already died in the bombing.
Source Code’s themes are similar to those in director Duncan Jones’s previous film, Moon, and it has many of the same flaws: once again, he lays out the clues to key plot points so laboriously that we can figure them out ahead of the characters, and the naive existentialism falls apart if you think about it for any length of time.
It’s watchable in spite of itself, and Gyllenhaal and Monaghan are great together. But it’s not nearly as clever as it thinks it is – especially in its final minutes.
