Plus a time-travel movie or two, of course (#SFWApro)

ABOUT TIME (2013) stars Domhnall Gleeson as a young man who learns from Dad Bill Nighy that men in his family all have the ability to jump back through time to make do-overs, which Gleeson uses to help win the heart of Rachel McAdams. The do-over method is odd, as it requires physically jumping back while presumably the past self disappears (which in at least one scene would have been in front of witnesses) and the movie starts making up new rules midway through (some of which Nighy should really have told his kid). This doesn’t work as romance either, Gleeson coming off like he’s trying to imitate Hugh Grant’s shy-but-endearing persona (and the way he screws up his first date with McAdams is pure idiot plot). “If it had been a very bad day, I would have had to have sex with you to make up for it.”

Legendary hack director Bert I. Gordon’s THE BOY AND THE PIRATES (1960) looks a lot like a Treasure Island knockoff with the emphasis on lovably roguish Blackbeard bonding with the protagonist, a pirate-loving kid who gets sent back to the pirate age by a genie. As usual, Gordon’s direction is pedestrian and this is dull without the entertaining lunacy of films such as Beginning of the End. “Squirt, bind, square—I have never heard these words.”

SPY KIDS: All the Time in the World (2011) is a Next Generation sequel in which the step-children of retired super-spy Jessica Alba become the new Spy Kids when a masked villain tries to stop all the time in the world. Which wouldn’t count as time-travel if it wasn’t for this being Step One in a plan to go back in time and save his father (which doesn’t make much sense with a father who died of old age). Way, way below the quality of the original film, with uninteresting kid leads who somehow know enough about time travel to explain exactly what the fatal flaw in the villain’s plan is. With Jeremy Piven as Alba’s boss, the original Spy Kids in supporting roles and Danny Trejo as “Uncle Machete.” “Either that’s a coincidence or … that’s just an incredible coincidence!”

MY FUTURE BOYFRIEND (2011) takes my breath away for recycling that hoary cliché, the super-logical future society that has no concept of love or passion (though I suppose it’s possible for younger viewers, the idea’s so old it’s new). I could overlook that if the results were entertaining, but the story of a time traveler returning to the present to learn the meaning of such things from a romance novelist is just as stock in execution as concept. It does have a distinctly novel finish for a cross-time romance, though. “Earth will not be destroyed by a polar ice shift in the year 2012.”

Moving into the Not For the Book Zone, VANISHING ON 7TH STREET (2010) is a deadly dull film in which a Rapture-like event has most of humanity disappearing, leading to a handful of survivors huddling in downtown Chicago as light fades from the world and things lurk in the darkness. “I think God’s closed up shop, just like everybody else.”

Despite Netflix listing the animated FREEDOM FORCE (2012) it’s only in the sense the characters are traveling into Jules Verne’s 19th century novels to reboot them after a mysterious villain mixes everything up (“Quickly Passerpatout, board the flying train so we can reach the volcano and journey to the center of the Earth!”). Jimmy Neutron would have done it better and funnier, and I’m curious about the choice of From the Earth to the Moon and Five Weeks in a Balloon (alongside 20,000 Leagues) rather than a bigger-name Verne. Still, every movie I don’t include frees up more space in the book. With Sarah Michelle Gellar and Christopher Lloyd among the voice talent. “I understood everything the day the president said I was to be his right-hand man!”