Tim soon finds that if he travels back in time before she was born (or conceived?) that he will lose her – he can’t control the sperm that made her. Now, it’s about Tim’s entire life – his relationship with his father (Bill Nighy), who can also travel through time, his sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson), a troubled spirit who, distressingly, Tim doesn’t seem to help until it’s (almost) too late, and his infant daughter. Curtis handles the romance as capably as he’s done in past films, and we’re really rooting for the two to get together.īut then they do get together, surprisingly early in the film, and the romantic portion of the film is pretty much finished. The schmaltzy romantic stuff here works really well, as you might expect from the director, and Gleeson and (especially) McAdams make for appealing leads. Instead, About Time bites off more than it can chew – way more. It could easily make an entire Groundhog Day-like film, and I’d have been overly happy if that were the case.īut it’s not. But using time travel to try to ignite that spark that he knows is there – that’s a really neat twist on the usual rom-com trappings.

Why he doesn’t just go back and fix the other problem – his friend’s play – in some other way so he could do the restaurant thing again, I don’t know. This sets up a number of charming scenes in which Tim continually travels back in time to try to recreate that magic feeling. And now, in an alternate future – oh darn. They hit it off, he gets her number, and then… oh, he just has to go back in time and fix something else. Unfortunately, this is the one thing time travel can’t really help him with as he learns early in the film, you can’t make someone fall in love with you.īut he knows that spark when he finds it, in Mary (Rachel McAdams), a girl he meets on a blind date – a literal blind date, in one of those dining-in-the-dark restaurants. But Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) just wants to find love and happiness. Of course, most people would use this ability to win the lottery, become rich and famous, or heck, to prevent future disasters and save lives. A crowd-pleasing confection from writer-director Richard Curtis ( Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral), About Time spices the usual rom-com sentimentality with a sci-fi twist: our hero can travel in time at will, by shutting himself in a closet and just thinking about a prior time in his life.

About time movie 2013 review