A soldier assigned to prevent a terrorist attack repeatedly travels back in time to relive the same fateful eight minutes over and over again in director Duncan Jones’ “Source Code,” a fun ride of a sci-fi thriller with terrific romantic chemistry between Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan.
In “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray was given endless opportunities to warm up Andie MacDowell over the course of a single, repeated day. Gyllenhaal’s Colter Stevens, working with a shorter time frame, not only tries to get the girl, but save her and millions of other people from death — while sussing out how he ended up with this job in the first place — in Ben Ripley’s devilishly clever script.
“Source Code” is the sort of movie best enjoyed without prior knowledge — and there are really very few movies whose secrets are actually worth keeping in this spoiler-phobic age. So feel free to stop reading now and head for your nearest theater.
OK? I do have to get into some moderately spoiler-ish details here if you want to read a review that isn’t pointlessly vague.
One day Colter, who last remembers flying a mission in Afghanistan, suddenly finds himself on a commuter train headed toward Chicago. Christina (Monaghan), an attractive woman he’s never met, is chatting with him as if they’ve known each other for a while. And when he looks in the restroom mirror, Colter sees another man’s face. He has the other man’s ID in his wallet.
After eight profoundly disorienting minutes, there’s a massive explosion that destroys the train. When Colter comes to, he’s in some sort of cramped environment somewhere with a mysterious officer named Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) giving him orders on a video screen.
She tells Colter that he’s part of an experimental program — one he doesn’t remember volunteering for — that uses a “source code” to send subjects back to replay the last eight minutes of another person’s life. The extremely reluctant Colter’s assignment is to keep repeating this loop until he finds a passenger on the train who’ll get off before its destruction and is planning a much larger terrorist attack later that day.
So back Colter travels in time, repeatedly, to search for the culprit on a train loaded with more red herrings than an Agatha Christie novel.
But Christina proves a major distraction; before long our hero has fallen in love with her. Which is problematic, since Goodwin repeatedly informs Colter that she’s already dead and there’s absolutely nothing he can do to change the past, including saving her and the other passengers on the train. He needs to focus on the future and the millions of other, still-living people in Chicago.
That’s easier said than done. Colter is becoming increasingly obsessed about where he is and how he got into this situation — slowly cajoling information out of Goodwin and the impatient scientist (Jeffrey Wright) running the project. The latter repeatedly warns Colter he’s squandering the finite amount of time available to stop the big attack.
Jones — the director of “Moon” and the son of David Bowie — handles this complex narrative with great assurance and gets warm, compassionate performances out of Gyllenhaal and Monaghan that greatly enhance the movie’s dramatic credibility.
This turns out to be crucial, since the film’s sentimental ending isn’t anywhere near as convincing as the other sections. But by that point I was so onboard with the stars and the premise that it didn’t affect my enjoyment of “Source Code.” I think you’ll like it, too.
lou.lumenick@nypost.com.