Leofwine_draca
TICKING CLOCK is a shabby straight to video serial killer thriller in which a slumming-it Cuba Gooding Jr. plays a reporter investigating the journal of a crazed killer, played with customary relish by Neal McDonough. As the story gets more complex and Gooding Jr. befriends a twisted young boy who has an unusual link to the crimes, things take on a sci-fi twist that reminded me a little of the ones in FREQUENCY or DEJA VU. Sadly, this is a criminally low budget production, shot in a shabby and gloomy style, that merely comes across as depressing and bereft of ideas.
Megan Dommer
Cuba's performance left a lot to be desired...I think he was going for 'stunned' for the dramatic moments, but it just came off as blank and lifeless. The supporting actors weren't bad. I'll always have a soft spot for Nicki from her Supernatural days. It's not completely the actors' fault that this ended up being nearly unwatchable. The plot itself was just bad sci-fi. It made no sense. The murderer turns out to be a guy from the future who wants to give his younger self a better life than he had. Okay. That I'll buy. So he comes back and kills his abusive mother, which puts the kid in a worse situation (living with his aunt). So future guy kills the aunt, which puts the kid in an orphanage so the future self comes back and kills the teacher who's recommendation kept him from being adopted and so on blah blah blah. In the end, the time-traveling murder ends up killing his younger self, which in turn kills the future self and rights everything. And by rights everything, I mean it sticks the younger self right back in the original situation with the crack whore mom that ended up producing his serial-killing future self in the first place. Fail.They either needed to kill the kid and have him stay dead or change his situation so drastically (Cuba adopting him and making him grow up to be less of a sociopath, for example) that he no longer becomes creepy guy from Desperate Housewives. Just a bad movie, all around.
Doyle Kearney
What a load of crap, I had to turn this off about a half hour into it. The script was crap, the acting was crap. What a waste of film. This will be the last Cuba Gooding movie I watch. If this is the best he can do now he may as well get a job at Home Depot or Walmart. What a waste of a promising career, his projects have bee going from bad to worse and this by far is the worst I've seen. How does a person go from an Academy Award to this, is it bad management, poor project selection or no input or interest in his own career. Where is the Cuba Gooding that acted in A Murder of Crows, bring back the Cuba and maybe he'd get some better roles. What a shame.
Nick Damian
Not a bad movie, a polish on the script would have helped this and maybe even made this a blockbuster - rather than a straight to DVD release.The writing for the cops and the first investigation of a murder scene was really poorly scripted.It must be obvious that the writer has little knowledge of police interrogation and kinda missed the entire personal emotions for it.That aside, building it up could have been done better, but still I think that the story was alright.It certainly is no Back To The Future or Terminator
AD
