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Donner has spoken about the production problems on the film which would make the circumstances of Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote epic (detailed in the documentary Lost In La Mancha) seem like an overturned catering truck. The major problems with it seemingly stem more from the source material (and the subsequent screenplay) than with lost money, writer’s strikes and studio interference. Donner is left with rather a crocked pot to work with and as it starts out promisingly, it can’t contain a rather muddled and far too insipid narrative past the first act.

A man wanders into the desert, ice cold and with his interiors not connecting all the dots. Members of an archaelogical dig in France discover a message written in their professor’s (Billy Connolly) handwriting from 1357. The message – “Help me.” A science lab has been creating a three-dimensional fax machine (not unlike Jeff Goldblum in The Fly or Star Trek beaming technology) and accidentally opened a wormhole to the 14th century. Welcome to the quick moving, but nicely developed first act.

The lab’s chief, Robert Doniger (David Thewlis playing a rather lackluster weasel) flies in the archaeologists including the Professor’s son, Chris (Paul Walker without dad’s thick Scottish accent), his longtime crush, Kate (Frances O’Connor), loyal history enthusiast, Andre Marek (Gerard Butler) and smart guy in glasses, David (Ethan Embry). There’s also a French guy the movie keeps treating as “oh yeah, there’s this guy too.”

The gang quickly agrees to risk life and limb to save the Prof and only David objects to having his molecules broken down, leaving him to stay behind to help with fax maintenance when one of the “Marines” they send unwisely brings a grenade back with him. The Marine Corps could probably bring a class action suit against the film for portraying the most ineffective soldiers this side of Pvt. Santiago in A Few Good Men.

As we enter the main thrust of the story, we’re left with an overwhelming sense of “this is it?” This is all Crichton, Donner and screenwriters Jeff Maguire and George Nolfi can do with the material? A time-travel adventure that puts a bunch of young turks into the middle of the smallest battle (a turning point, no less) of the Hundred Years War? Sounds like Crichton had a teleplay rejected once for Sliders and decided to do what he always does – put in a lot of fascinating science stuff to distract from the patchiness of the characters and the lack of profundity in the tale.

I enjoy a good trebuchet as the next fella, but Timeline was well past the point of using great action to supplement the minute-by-minute blandness of the adventure. “We’ve got 600 years of knowledge on these guys,” says Chris, convincing everyone they should be able to escape in 20 minutes. Giving Paul Walker that line of motivation is probably not a wise idea since he continually plays characters we can’t believe made it out of high school. But it’s still a solid thought and there’s no coalation between the strategies of a 20th Century male with technology on the brain and the 14th Century soldier unaware of the potency of “Greek fire” until the Prof can “invent” it seven centuries after it had first been utilized. Other than that it's basically escaping from villages that the Big Bad Wolf would have no problems with and hearing the Monty Python cry of “run away, run away!”

The story may be stupid and the characters no more careworthy than a tampon wrapper in the toilet, but you’d never expect it to be this dull, dull. dull. My God it's dull, it's so desperately dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and des-per-ate-ly DULL. Observe as Frances O’Connor escapes from a straw hut. Thrill as her and Paul Walker sit in a tunnel. Watch the REAL fire arrows and trebuchets do their thing. And yes, they are real. We’ve been told that no CGI was used during the battle sequences. But, realistically, why? This ain’t Braveheart or some film that depends on realism for added thrills or accuracy. It’s Paul Walker escaping with his costume from Castle Cameos Pictures at the Las Vegas Excalibur.

I don’t know what in the novel made this so interesting to those other than the Crichton loyalists. Its one fresh idea of having the machine unable to match up your interiors after 10 or 11 trips through is completely abandoned to an afterthought. The action is lifeless. The time-space continuum paradoxes are lame and obvious. I’ve haven’t seen villains less menacing since Sonny Bono in Airplane 2. It pains me to say all of this. I’m just going to forget that I even saw it after I forget that Richard Donner had anything to do with it. You go see Timeline if you want to. I’m going to go play a game of Crossbows and Catapults.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8364&reviewer=198
originally posted: 11/26/03 17:05:19
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