Review: 'Time Loop' a Waste of Time

Man, do I love time-travel movies. The possibilities boggle my mind with the intricacies of how it could be possible and what would happen if it were.

There are big-budget films like the classic "Back to the Future" and small ones like the fantastic "Predestination." Then there's "Time Loop."

Essentially a four-character drama, "Time Loop" is about an estranged father and son who are working together on a scientific experiment on a farm in a quaint Italian village. A few things occur, and suddenly the duo has created a time loop and needs to fix it before things go out of control.

I've read reviews that spoke of a smart script and an easy-to-follow plot, but I'm wondering if we saw the same movie. While it's a fairly simple premise that takes place in literally three total locations, the problem is twofold. One, the dialogue is sometimes laughably bad; and two, Mino Sferra, who plays father Riccardo, struggles so much with the English language you can't tell if it's just that he doesn't understand what he's saying or if he's not a very good actor. (The same goes for Ellie Poussot, who plays a clinical psychologist.)

The issue here is that, with his monumentally thick accent, Sferra is the one trying to explain the science to us, but you need subtitles to understand him. Luckily, the character of his son Ricky (Sam Gittins) grew up in London, so he speaks perfect English. Even luckier, Gittins is also a good actor.

The biggest problem is that we don't know what the stakes are. There's the subplot about the father and son's strained relationship, but we don't care; nor do we understand why his son would join him on the venture, to begin with. At one point, dad clumsily shoves his son into the time machine, causing the entire thing to go awry. So now we just think dad's a dick. Then there's the question of how he got the money to create a flippin' time machine in a barn. "I had some savings." Really? To build a time machine? The whole thing becomes head-scratching and not all that interesting. Basically, their problem is too many Ricky's in the same time. I kept yelling at the screen to just kill the duplicates and be done with it.

Most of the "clever" time travel-y run-ins and duplications are telegraphed long before they come around again, so there are no surprises here. A few plot points are given their reveal in the end, but for the most part, you can guess them long before we get the "surprise."

Honestly, I wonder if writer/director Ciro Sorrentino had made his first feature in Italian it would have fared better. Here, it just comes across awkward and badly acted. Gittins is the only one who comes out unscathed. Even at a brief 82 minutes, I found myself wishing I could jump in the time machine so I could turn off the movie and get that period of my life back.