Source Code: Make every second count, by checking this movie out!

US Army helicopter pilot Colter Stevens wakes up on a commuter train in Chicago. His last memories were of flying sorties in Afghanistan but soon he realizes not only is back in the United States, but he has also assumed the identity of another man. Eight minutes later his train blows up but he does not die, he awakens to discover himself in a pod where a woman named Goodwin tells him he must go back to that train and stop the bomb from blowing it up or else the entire town of Chicago will be destroyed.

Source Code was another example of a sci-fi thriller that not only attempted to blow the audience away with its high tech premise, but also use that unconventional storyline to explore the human condition.

The futuristic premise, which featured Gyllenhaal's Stevens reliving another man's reality in order to stop a terrorist attack on Chicago, might seemed far fetched but writer Ben Ripley and director Duncan Jones did it right by setting the story in modern times. This grounded the story in a reality that the audience was acutely aware of. Ripley and Jones also did a good job of roping the audience into the plot by keeping the mystery of who planted the bomb and their ultimate motives in foregound of the story, not buried in the back in favor of more special effects bells and whistles.

The story was intriguing (some have described it as Groundhog Day meets 12 Monkeys) but what truly set it apart from other films (sci-fi or otherwise) was the humanity Jake Gyllenhaal brought to his role. If handled in the wrong way the film could have easily become laughably cheesy, like Jean Claude Van Damme's Timecop, in that the action would have swallowed the narrative whole. But Gyllenhaal brought emotion and soul to his performance, a set of talents sadly lacking in most action heroes nowadays. Through his struggles in trying to understand just what was expected of him in his attempts to locate that bomb, he came to realize a number of things about his life, deeper personal realizations which caused him to rethink and question just who he was and what he stood for. Source Code challenged the audience to rethink along with Gyllenhaal, a quality not seen in most recently released films.

Source Code is an intelligent and emotionally satisfying sci-fi thriller that you should not miss.

Grade: B+

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time; Good for a two hour break

Prince Dastan must team up with Princess Tamina to not only clear his name in regards to the death of his father King Sharaman but also to keep a mystical dagger called “the Sands of Time” from falling into the wrong hands.

All the ingredients were there for another Jerry Bruckheimer produced mega-smash film (he is responsible for producing, amongst many films, The Pirates of the Caribbean, National Treasure and Bad Boys movies). There was a hunky male lead in Jake Gyllenhaal, who was believable as Dastan albeit with an unbelievable British accent, a beautiful (and completely underused) female co-star in Gemma Arterton as well as a breadth of story telling material from which to create an entertaining adventure given the fact that there are more Prince of Persia video game titles than there are Kardashian sisters. So why wasn’t it the slam bang desert adventure one was hoping for? The action was there as the audience was given plenty of sword play and rooftop shenanigans from Dastan (a staple of the video games I am told) plus the chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Arterton was palpable. Their characters did not automatically fall for one another as one might have been expecting in a film such as this but, through some nice chunks of dialogue, grew upon each other (and grew as characters) so that when the final climax of the film came, the tension facing Dastan and Tamina actually gripped the audience and sucked them in. However that was the issue with Sands of Time, the plot was convoluted to the point of being frustrating and ultimately forgettable. The reason for Dastan and Tamina’s quest to keep the dagger safe and the dagger’s true purpose and power were explained, but even those explanations were lost amongst the poorly constructed sub-plots of the struggle amongst Dastan and his brothers for their dead father’s crown, the true intentions of his dubious Uncle Nizam (Ben Kingsley) and a boat load of ineffective CGI.

In the end, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was nothing more than a nice two hour distraction, which one immediately forgot about when they hit the stop button on their DVD player.

Grade: C-