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"The Time Machine"
(Reviewed March 2, 2002)
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This movie starts out so well that I wanted to shake my fist at the screen and shout obscenities when it went to hell. That was at precisely the moment when Guy Pearce (excellent as a college professor who creates the title device in hopes of saving his dead fiancee's life) encounters clownish, pop-eyed, no-talent fool Orlando Jones (best known for shilling "7-Up" in an increasingly grating series of TV ads).
Jones, artlessly playing a wise-cracking, eye-rolling hologram of a reference librarian, completely derails a movie that until his appearance was a charmingly old-fashioned science-fiction adventure story. Whoever's bright idea it was to "Robin-Williams-ize" things by tossing in this painfully unfunny and inappropriate character should be fed to Morlocks, head-first.
Things get even worse when Pearce fast-forwards thousands of more years into the future and encounters a tribe of hill dwellers who appear to have just wandered in from Venice Beach, some of whom speak completely fluent present-day English. This part of the movie has a very Kevin-Costner-in-"Waterworld" feel about it, and I don't mean that in a good way...
This is all a real shame, because Pearce manages to do the impossible with his role by playing things completely straight. Also, the special visual effects are dazzling throughout the movie, especially the time-lapse photography segments as Pearce travels through time. (Stan Winston's designs for the evil Morlocks, however, are unexpectedly cheesy. The creatures often look like guys in bad costumes, even when they are computer animated--which is certainly a strange accomplishment.) And an encounter toward the end of the film between Pearce and Jeremy Irons (directed by Gore Verbinski, spelling director Simon West) is genuinely creepy and kind of moving.
Even with its flaws, "The Time Machine" has such a timeless plot (well, it does) that it's still a fascinating ride. I only wish that everything else about the production had been as impressive as Pearce's performance, the set designs and the visual effects. Maybe next "time."
Back Row Grade: C-
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