MOVIE DETAILS
Rating: 5.7 out of 10
Director: Paul Currie
Writer: Todd Stein, Nathan Parker
Star: Michiel Huisman, Teresa Palmer, Sam Reid
Genres: Drama/Mystery/Romance/Sci-Fi/Thriller
Release Date: June 30, 2017 (United States)
2:22
“2:22” is a cheesy thriller that only works because of its odd timing. A Jay-Z album called 4:44, which also happens to favor numbers, is released in theaters and on VOD the same day. Time titles never make their way into any medium, so what are the odds of two on one day? Maybe it means something. Or maybe it’s just another meaningless coincidence in a movie full of them.
Michiel Huisman plays an air traffic controller who recognizes patterns in life; at least, he tells us as much during his clunky opening voiceover. This works really well for him at work where he’s able to see flight plans with savant-like quality (or at least they present it that way) but then starts happening elsewhere in his life too. He bikes through the city to Grand Central Station every morning and notices different people doing the same thing in exactly the same order women laughing, someone saying “can I help you?”, a car honking, et cetera. City ambience or something more than that? Stranger still, at Grand Central station itself he sees very similar patterns couples hugging, a pregnant woman, a group of school kids and at precisely 2:22 p.m., some kind of malfunction always occurs there; glass shatters randomly or light bulbs explode above.
There’s an interesting point about how things seem to fall into pattern/ repetition here somewhere along this movie where everything seems aimed towards being a love story instead. There’s even a meet-cute one for the books when he meets an art curator named Sarah (Teresa Palmer, definitively thankless) whose plane he almost caused to hit another plane on the runway. In this unnatural script’s eloquence (of which there is lots), the humdinger exchange goes: “I was on that flight.” “I nearly killed you.” “No, you saved me.” Later on, Sarah’s artist boyfriend Jonas (Sam Reid) puts on a hologram display that shows the exact images Dylan’s been seeing… is Dylan going crazy? Is everything he sees every day just another coincidence, a one in billion chance? More threads are created involving a murder that happened 30 years ago at Grand Central station; director Paul Currie has a nice look for the movie but not the vision to make all these magic beans grow into one captivating entity.
Like “The Number 23” or “Knowing” before it, “2:22” breaks an unwritten rule about coincidences in movies where if details in script are made so obvious of course patterns will arise. There is hardly any awe as the movie starts creating trends out of what’s going on because it feels more like screenwriters trying to pull off eight tricks at once than anything else. You’re watching it halfway through just to see if makes sense ultimately. By the end it does, and for some wayward cheesy reason I won’t spoil but also can’t say I was least amused by.
Huisman, a rising actor, doesn’t prove himself to be much of a leading man in “2:22,” even though we see him doing everything working out in his apartment, biking through city streets, furrowing his brow while picking up keys. His character is as wooden as all the other people in this movie, and never gets a chance to change that.
As weird things start happening with the universe around him, it feels less like he’s pondering some deep intellectual thought and more like he’s striking a pose; he’s not given much of a sense of humor to leaven the charisma either. But if you’re a “Game of Thrones” fan who wants to watch Huisman play the sexiest air traffic controller alive for two hours, “2:22” can help with that.
The movie’s busyness does it no favors. There’s an entire first act about his job as an air traffic controller fast-paced air traffic controlling could be cut entirely from this movie and it would still make him look super cool and let him say “punch it!” into a phone while in close-up but once again everyone just reacts too quickly and if you blink you’ll miss the part where they stop reacting.
Close calls build tension in sequences outside of that work environment (as when Dylan is driving in a cab and seems to avoid predestined accidents by milliseconds), but the editing is too choppy here to create tension, or anything else.
To its credit, or maybe out of concession through dialogue or stand-out visuals that never achieve intellectual grandiosity so they might as well keep things simple (Dylan says key connections aloud whenever they’re made; one vision has him scrawling “2:22 – BOOM!” on a glass pane during his madness-at-home phase), “2:22” knows what it is.
It also knows what movies are supposed to be when they’re not, so it sets up the possibility of being one of those instead. (There’s an elaborate mural on the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal that I think is supposed to represent a Stargate or something; it’s never mentioned again.) But really, “2:22” just wants to be seen as clever, and can come off as disingenuous in its pursuit.
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