November 26, 2003 | Coming so soon after the Middle Aged slapstick of Black Knight and the self-conscious tongue-in-cheekiness of A Knight’s Tale – not to mention the 25 th -anniversary reissue of Monty Python and the Holy Grail – Timeline is hard-pressed to convince contemporary moviegoers that medieval mayhem should be taken seriously. But bad timing is by no means the only problem hobbling this tepid time-travel adventure.
Directed with an atypical lack of zip by the usually reliable Richard Donner ( Lethal Weapon ), and blandly performed by a dully competent, charisma-challenged cast, this by-the-numbers adaptation of Michael Crichton’s best-seller falls somewhere in the gray middle ground between rock-the-house entertainment and so-bad-it’s-funny guilty pleasure. Neither exceptionally fine nor howlingly awful, the movie is a time-tripping time-killer that leaves no lasting impression.
Chris (Paul Walker of The Fast and the Furious ) and Kate (Frances O’Connor of A.I. ) are first and second among equals in a group of archeological students on a dig in provincial France. When the team uncovers the ruins of a 14 th -century castle, Kate and her cohorts make a remarkable discovery: A handwritten plea for help scrawled by Chris’ father, Edward Johnson (an unusually restrained Billy Connolly), a noted professor who isn’t known for planting practical jokes in excavation sites.
The students seek answers at the headquarters of high-tech mogul Robert Doniger (David Thewlis), major funder of the Johnson-led dig. And, sure enough, Doniger spills the beans: While experimenting with a device to transport three-dimensional objects through space – sort of like the dingus Captain Kirk uses in Star Trek – his scientists “accidentally discovered time travel.” (Gee, don’t you hate it when that happens?) Johnson took an ill-advised blast to the past, so his students – led by Doniger’s transparently shifty security chief (Neal McDonough of TV’s late, much-lamented Boomtown ) – must do the time warp back to 1357 on a search-and-rescue mission.
It’s par for the course in time-travel stories that time-travelers are warned they must never – repeat, never – do anything in the past that might alter the future. In Timeline , however, the warning is ignored with uncommon impunity, as the good guys (allied with French forces) kill bad guys (invading Brits) more or less at will, and a love-smitten archeologist (Gerald Butler) saves the life of a French beauty (Anna Friel) whose death, we’re repeatedly told, changed the course of 14 th -century history. All of which raises an indelicate question: If the makers of Timeline don’t have any regard for the logic of their own plot, why should we?
