Review: Source Code

I am insanely tired right now, but writing this is the last thing on my 'Things To Do Today' list, and I NEVER complete those lists, so it's gonna be short, sweet but - at least - existing outside my head.

I'll be honest; I was expecting Source Code to be...well, Jake Gyllenhaal in Inception meets Groundhog Day. I was not complaining. Groundhog Day was good, Inception was excellent and I LOVE me a bit o' Jake Gyllenhaal.

But Source Code had more to it than that. The plot is kind of hard to explain without a) giving anything away and b) giving myself (and you) a headache, but I'll try and simplify it. An American soldier finds himself on a train, in the body of another man, with no idea what is going on, how he got there or who he's supposed to be. Eight minutes later, the train explodes. He then finds himself in the 'Source Code', a new invention which is (eventually) explained to be a machine by which the last eight minutes of a person's life can be relived, as many times as necessary, in slightly altering parallels. Still with me? Right. The soldier's job is to find the man who bombed the train to prevent more innocent people being killed, but he ends up getting attached to a girl on the train and trying to defy reality and drama ensues. Believe it or not, that really was simplified.

Anyway, it would have been easy for the film to get tedious, with the same two settings, the same chronology of events, the same inevitable conclusion, but some clever writing resulted in a very gripping and fast-paced film. My penchant for cheeky smiles means I'd never be anything but approving of Jake Gyllenhaal, but my favourite performance was actually that of Vera Farmiga, whose portrayal of a fellow soldier on the other side of the 'Source Code', trying to explain AND with-hold information from Jake Gyllenhaal was touchingly subtle.

Basic summary: mind-bending, romantic, complicated and unpredictable thriller/drama with eye-candy galore and intelligent writing, which avoided the frequent modern pitfall of killing a film by being just twenty minutes too long.

Rating: * * * * (very good)