Source Code: Delightfully confusing

What’s on now: Listening to Kris Allen’s CD on my iTunes. I’ve wanted it since it came out two years ago, and I finally ordered it off Amazon last week. So worth the wait.

I went to see Jake Gyllenhaal’s new action-thriller Source Code with a friend over the weekend. We both thoroughly enjoyed the film, from guessing the answers to the mysteries to cheering for Jake in all his hotness. It was certainly a head-scratcher that will keep you guessing even after the credits roll.

My friend and I couldn’t stop rehashing what the heck just happened over calzones and cannolis afterwards. We nearly forgot to flirt with our cute waiter, we were so confused. But it was a good kind of confused. As much as they drive me insane for days afterwards, I quite enjoy movies that make me yell, “Wait... WHAT??” just as the screen goes black for the last time. This one was even more head-scratch-tastic than Inception’s ending! I shall say no more for fear of spoiling one or both of these movies for you.

Source Code follows the efforts of Captain Colter Stevens, played by Gyllenhaal, as he tries to figure out who bombed a Chicago passenger train earlier that morning. Up in the Air’s Vera Farmiga plays Captain Goodwin, the Air Force technician who is helping Colter through the assignment. Using highly sophisticated simulation technology, Colter is repeatedly sent “back in time,” (it is established early on that the program is NOT actual time travel) to the consciousness of one of the train passengers. From there he has to unravel the attack before the bomber strikes again, this time in the heart of downtown Chi-Town.

Michelle Monaghan (Eagle Eye) plays Christina, a woman on the train, who happens to be the girlfriend of the person whose body Colter is inhabiting. She’s a sweet woman who wins Colter’s heart, even mid-mission, until he becomes basically obsessed with saving her and the rest of the people on the doomed train. But Source Code, as the program is called, is not time travel. The people Colter is seeing on this train are already dead and can’t be saved. All Colter can do is try to find the bomber before he kills more innocent civilians.

And one more thing. He only has eight minutes to do it.

I definitely would and already have recommended this movie to pretty much anyone. It’s got action, it’s got mystery, it’s even got a little romance, but nothing too distracting from the fact that there’s a big-ass bomb on the train.

In all fairness, however, even though I really liked this movie, the ending bothered me a bit. They get you going thinking it’s going to end a certain way, and I had made my peace with it. As sad or upsetting as it might have been, I think it would have been the best way to do it. But then they throw you this massive curveball in the last two minutes that actually makes no sense at all when you think about it. Not that science fiction-ish action movies always need to make sense, but this one did have some blaring holes in the plot.

I’m willing to forgive Source Code, however. For one thing, it didn’t try to jump on the 3D conformist bandwagon (Hallelujah!!) even though they probably could have if they had forced it. There were more than a few epic explosions, after all. Secondly, I really enjoyed Jake’s performance (almost made me forget Prince of Persia ever happened), as well as his interactions with Monaghan and Farmiga. He really makes you feel for the character of Colter, who’s just trying to save people and keeps getting blown up over and over again for it. And at one point he even gets hit by another train. Yeowch.

Good cast, good effects, good story, good movie.  Definitely worth the price of a movie ticket.

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga

Directed by: Duncan Jones

Rated PG-13

2011