20-minute time-travel warning

RETROACTIVE (1997)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

 

Time-travel is such a fanciful fantasy plagued with so many intricate problems and paradoxes that it might not be worth the trouble. In the case with "Retroactive," the issue is stopping not just one murder but several murders. Good luck with that when you got a 20 minute jump start.

Karen (Kylie Travis), a psychotherapist, has car trouble in the middle of the desert. She is helped by Frank, a boisterous and very rough Texan (Jim Belushi) who treats his wife, Rayanne (Shannon Whirry), like garbage. Karen wants a ride to get a mechanic, but Frank has other ideas and one of them involves murder. Rayanne is shot in the head and Karen runs into a conveniently located government facility where a scientist named Brian (Frank Whaley) is conducting a time-travel experiment with mice thanks to a particle accelerator. Can Karen use the experiment to prevent the killing of Frank's wife?

"Retroactive" has a few lapses in time-travel logic, if such a thing even exists. How can Brian prepare a videotape of himself and have it be viewed once he goes back in time, approximately ten minutes before he kills a mouse (DO NOT ASK!)? The movie's internal logic makes no sense because the movie never establishes that alternate timelines coexist or merge. So when Karen keeps going back 10 or 20 minutes before Rayanne's murder, no other action committed by Karen remains in the future timeline she keeps returning to, which means there are alternating timelines. Whew!

"Retroactive" is an action thriller with a sci-fi concept but the movie manifests as nothing more than a series of endless shootings. Karen shoots at Frank and practically misses every time. Frank shoots back, is thrown through glass partitions, drives like a maniac and keeps shooting. Shooting after shooting after shooting - what an exhausting time travel cycle that must be to return to. The movie becomes a wearying chore to sit through and lacks any psychological aspects or fun character types (a family in a stationwagon and M. Emmett Walsh's nervous impulse with, again, the trigger of a gun is as sharp a character definition as you will get). The movie never lets us in on Travis's Karen, the protagonist we are supposed to root for - she got into some haywired mess in the past but it is barely dealt with. Jim Belushi's Frank is a one-dimensional side-burned psycho who keeps getting pounded and shot at but he is nothing more than a cartoonish Terminator on the loose. Whirry's Rayanne is a looker but precious little is divulged about her aside from being physically abused by Frank. I wish I could go back in time and say something different but "Retroactive" is a numbing bore.