November 26, 2003 | Coming so soon
after the Middle Aged slapstick of Black Knight and the self-conscious tongue-in-cheekiness
of A Knight's Tale – not to mention the 25 th -anniversary reissue
of Monty Python and the Holy Grail – Timeline is hard-pressed
to convince contemporary moviegoers that medieval mayhem should be taken
seriously. But bad timing is by no means the only problem hobbling this
tepid time-travel adventure.
Directed with an atypical lack of zip by the usually reliable Richard
Donner ( Lethal Weapon ), and blandly performed by a dully competent,
charisma-challenged cast, this by-the-numbers adaptation of Michael Crichton's
best-seller falls somewhere in the gray middle ground between rock-the-house
entertainment and so-bad-it's-funny guilty pleasure. Neither exceptionally
fine nor howlingly awful, the movie is a time-tripping time-killer that
leaves no lasting impression.
Chris (Paul Walker of The Fast and the Furious ) and Kate (Frances
O'Connor of A.I. ) are first and second among equals in a group
of archeological students on a dig in provincial France. When the team
uncovers the ruins of a 14 th -century castle, Kate and her cohorts make
a remarkable discovery: A handwritten plea for help scrawled by Chris'
father, Edward Johnson (an unusually restrained Billy Connolly), a noted
professor who isn't known for planting practical jokes in excavation
sites.
The students seek answers at the headquarters
of high-tech mogul Robert Doniger (David Thewlis), major funder of
the Johnson-led dig. And, sure enough, Doniger spills the beans: While
experimenting with a device to transport three-dimensional objects
through space – sort of like the
dingus Captain Kirk uses in Star Trek – his scientists “accidentally
discovered time travel.” (Gee, don't you hate it when that happens?)
Johnson took an ill-advised blast to the past, so his students – led
by Doniger's transparently shifty security chief (Neal McDonough of TV's
late, much-lamented Boomtown ) – must do the time warp back
to 1357 on a search-and-rescue mission.
It's par for the course in time-travel stories
that time-travelers are warned they must never – repeat, never – do
anything in the past that might alter the future. In Timeline , however, the warning
is ignored with uncommon impunity, as the good guys (allied with French
forces) kill bad guys (invading Brits) more or less at will, and a love-smitten
archeologist (Gerald Butler) saves the life of a French beauty (Anna Friel)
whose death, we're repeatedly told, changed the course of 14 th -century
history. All of which raises an indelicate question: If the makers of Timeline don't
have any regard for the logic of their own plot, why should we?