Thanks, I Hate It: Source Code

Duncan Jones’ Source Code is the kind of film they screen on the bus. It has a score interchangeable with the soundtrack of any gray-blue action movie released in the last fifteen years, a plot like a shitty late-period Michael Crichton novel, and an utterly forgettable pair of leads in Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monahagn. The movie’s weird, cack-handed subplot about disabled veterans is some of the shabbiest Hollywood ableism in recent memory, right up there with Avatar’s heart-wrenching tale of a man who escaped his wheelchair to become an anime catboy.

More than any of the Stoic Troop Army of One shit, though, or the movie’s reflexive horror at the disabled, it’s the careless tedium of Source Code’s story that sinks it. A man gets sent into a simulation of a train that already got bombed to identify the bomber and prevent a second attack. He fails and gets sent back. Repeat until done. That the twists occur not so much in the ostensible driving elements of the plot as in the liminal spaces between them is vaguely interesting, but the train story is so utterly devoid of compelling elements that it kills the rest of the movie’s already tenuous appeal stone-cold dead.

Gyllenhaal and Monahagn have the kind of sexual chemistry you’d expect from two catalog-pretty people, which is to say they make sense together but don’t inspire much heat. Monahagn is only in the movie to be wanted, to provide a human anchor for the tossed-off train terrorist storyline. It’s a carelessly underwritten role, bland and mushy like food that’s already been chewed. The whole movie has that kind of pre-digested feeling to it, as though it’s been focus grouped past the point of having been recognizably made by independent people.

The whole thing is so sanded down and antiseptic that when it takes a wish-fulfillment left turn in its last leg it doesn’t even feel surprising. It’s just one kind of boredom spilling over into another as the movie discards its own more or less competently-established stakes and introduces a bunch of arbitrary shit at the last minute to avoid showing anything that could be construed as disappointing in any way. Veteran hero troop Jake Gyllenhaal gets the girl, he gets his undamaged body back, he stops the terrorist and foils Vera Farmiga ,who to this day I don’t think has ever been anything less than excellent OR cast in anything approaching a good movie. Why bother having watched at all, you know?