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Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel
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| Year: |
2009
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Director: |
Gareth Carrivick
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| Stars: |
Chris O'Dowd, Marc Wootton, Dean Lennox Kelly, Anna Faris, Meredith MacNeill, Ray Gardner, Nick Ewans, Arthur Nightingale
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| Genre: |
Comedy, Science Fiction |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Ray (Chris O'Dowd) has trouble holding down a job since moving to London from Ireland, such as today, when his position as a sci-fi theme park ride attendant becomes untenable after he gets carried away with the role playing and makes a room full of children wail in terror. Now unemployed, he wanders over to see his two friends, Toby (Marc Wootton) and Pete (Dean Lennox Kelly), who have jobs dressed as dinosaurs handing out flyers for a fast food restaurant, and they commiserate with him, inviting him down the pub for a drink to drown his sorrows. However, they do not know how fateful this simple action will be...
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel was evidently made with sci-fi - sorry, science fiction fans in mind, as it takes three such characters, well, two and an unconverted hanger-on anyway, and places them in just the universe shaking plot that they have only dreamed of, or watched others dreams of via movies and television and books. How does your average fan cope with such upheaval? According to this, they bumble through gradually growing more and more discombobulated until they are lost in a labyrinth of twisting plots and outlandish consequences of their actions that they eventually cannot make any sense of anymore.
Really, this was a genial shaggy dog story conjured up by writer Jamie Mathieson that may have had a cinema release, but was probably more at home on the small screen, as it resembled a pilot for a comedy series that would have spun off in as many directions as the budget would have allowed. It was no surprise to see TV comedy veteran Gareth Carrivick (who sadly died the year after this was released) at the helm, because no matter how drastic the situation becomes, the tone of the film is only a short step away from the likes of Red Dwarf or Hyperdrive. The results were not as mindboggling as apparently intended, but did contain no small amount of charm.
As the title suggests this took time travel as its theme, with Ray wishing he was Doctor Who, or a Time Lord at any rate, in the early stages and getting that wish granted after a fashion, except that neither he nor his mates are really up to the job and have to settle on muddling through their adventures rather than taking command and being the leaders rather than the led. It all starts when the trio get to the pub that night (and how British to set most of the action there - Shaun of the Dead obviously set a precedent) and Ray meets a young woman called Cassie (proper film star Anna Faris) who informs him as he makes his way back from the bar that she is from the future and that he is a revered figure over a century from now.
While Toby and Pete have trouble believing this in spite of his protestations, Pete comes around to his way of thinking when he pops out to use the gents and comes back in to see everyone in the place, including himself, lying slaughtered on the floor. He rushes out and back in again to see it's all back to normal, and Ray observes that this might be something to do with the "time leaks" Cassie mentioned. Working out that this all has to do with the toilets, they end up in an escalating series of absurd events that take in their religious idolisation as well as an apocalypse, as all the while the mysterious Editors catch up to wipe them out - but for what reason? This is never quite as clever as you want it to be, as there is no ingenious twist to pull all the threads together, it simply spirals off in various directions, but anything too mindbending could have been out of place - it's unashamedly daft, and that's its strongest asset. Music by James L. Venable.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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