I love a good time travel story. And I don't just mean the cute-but-don't-make-any-sense variety like "Terminator" or "Back to the Future", though those certainly have their place. I'll humor anything temporal from "Star Trek" to Stephen Hawking. The folks that made "Timecrimes" - a low-budget Spanish thriller about a guy that stumbles hours into the past and winds up trying to correct his last few mistakes - are clearly kindred spirits. And, though its title sounds far better in its native language ("Los Cronocrímenes"), that doesn't change the film's contrived plot contortions or "well, duh" obviousness.
It all starts in a Spanish country house where Hector (Karra Elejalde) and his companion Clara (Candela Fernandez) are unpacking from their move. While Clara is off shopping for dinner, Hector relaxes on a lawnchair to engage in few innocent glances through his binoculars. While gazing into the woods in the distance, he sees the kind of thing people only see in thrillers: an attractive young woman undressing (the sadly exploited beauty Barbara Goenaga). When she disappears, Hector is compelled to go look for her (what a good Samaritan). He finds her lying against a rock. Dead? Sleeping? As he moves in for a closer glance, something happens that sends him fleeing into the woods. As night falls, he stumbles upon a small research lab. Eventually, he finds a scientist (Nacho Vigalondo, who also wrote and directed) who persuades Hector to hide in a water-filled pod (think "The Fly"). The pod door closes and… Hector wakes up. But it's daylight, and the scientist is saying cryptic things like "you can't go home…you're already there."
Without giving too much more away, Hector finds himself a few hours in the past. As things progress again in chronological (cron-illogical?) order and Hector's decisions make less and less sense, he finds himself playing a game of catch up - each time he tries to correct a past mistake, things unravel further.
The film is essentially structured (as it must be) in three thirty-minute segments - each one is the same thirty minutes relived by a different "Hector" (they call themselves "Hector 1, 2 and 3"). This structure can certainly be successful (as "Groundhog Day" showed to the nth degree), but there's not enough going on in "Timecrimes" to keep it interesting. All the plot devices are so clearly laid out (the bloody bandage, the scissors, the walkie-talkies) that the film is less a mystery than a slowly unfolding experiment. It doesn't help that Hector is a completely uninteresting protagonist or that the characters don't behave like people. Like the worst of TV's "Lost" episodes, they behave not as humans but as the plot dictates they must behave.
Time travel stories certainly don't require big budgets. In fact sometimes, like the vastly superior "Primer", they're better off without one. Like Steven Soderbergh's 2002 remake of "
Solaris", "Timecrimes" feels like it was made by a filmmaker who loves the genre but hasn't done his homework. Nothing in "Timecrimes" is a surprise. Stories like this have already been told. Time and time again.
