The director John Ridley, who wrote “12 Years a Slave,” tries to combine time travel and romance, and comes up short twice.
Who among us has never dreamed of turning back time and changing a decision or event, just like Cher and the Terminator? That possibility is a reality in John Ridley’s sluggish, blandly slick time-travel romance, “Needle in a Timestack.”
Nick (Leslie Odom Jr.) is a fancy architect and his wife, Janine (Cynthia Erivo), is a fancy photographer. We know they are soul mates because they constantly talk about their great love, maybe to make up for the fact that they have no real personalities.
One day, Nick realizes there has been a so-called time shift — a slight realignment of reality after someone traveled back in time to change the past — thus modifying the present. Further, more consequential alterations in the timeline keep happening, until we end up in a reality where Janine is married to Tommy (Orlando Bloom), their old friend. Nick realizes that Tommy has been fiddling with the past to finally land the woman he wanted.
The most fascinating idea in “Needle in a Timestack” is that “time jaunting” is a mundane activity, up to a point: It is so expensive that only wealthy people like Tommy can afford it on a regular basis. But Ridley (the writer of “12 Years a Slave”) decides to stick to the shiny surfaces of aspirational lives, and keeps layering on banalities like “Love is drawn in the form of a circle” and “Have we really thought through the cause and effect of our choices?” That needle was clearly used to stitch slogans on pillows.
Needle in a TimestackRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
