PARADOX (2016)

Studio:       XLrator Media
Director:    Mike Hurst
Writer:       Mike Hurst
Producer:  Rick Benattar, Nigel Thomas
Stars:     Zoe Bell, Malik Yoba, Adam Huss, Bjorn Alexander, Jonathan Camp, Courtney Compton, Brian Flaccus, Michael Aaron Milligan, Steve Suh, Albert Stroth

Review Score:

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Summary:

A research team experimenting with time travel is stalked by a masked killer after sending someone into the future one hour.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

NSA agents Vukovich and Traxler stakeout a warehouse where wealthy benefactor Mr. Landau has a team of M.I.T. graduates working on a time travel portal in a secret underground laboratory. NSA agent Grace has spent two years infiltrating the Project 880 team, which includes silver spoon William Wishman, wheelchair-bound Lewis Abernathy, astrophysicist Randy Fraker, and Grace’s boyfriend Jim. Security guard Van Lang is assigned to escort Mr. Landau as the team takes the elevator underground to the control room.

The experiment is initiated at 11:00pm and results in a citywide blackout. Jim is sent one hour forward to midnight. He arrives in the lab only to find one team member decapitated while others lie dead or dying throughout the facility. Jim sees a masked man dragging Grace into the elevator. Dying, Lewis gives Jim his video camera. As a self-destruct sequence counts down, Jim runs back to the portal and returns to 11:00pm to warn everyone.

Accompanied by a SWAT team, Vukovich and Traxler raid the warehouse. With the elevator out of commission due to the blackout, work begins on restoring electrical power to the building so the armed agents can get down to the laboratory.

Suspicious that the NSA infiltrated the project, Landau sends Bill forward to 11:50pm to verify Jim’s seemingly wild claims. Bill’s decapitated head teleports back almost immediately.

The team checks CCTV footage and realizes that a masked killer is among them. Jim proposes going back in time to stop the experiment, but Randy warns that doing so would create a temporal paradox. However, after footage retrieved from Lewis’ camera shows him dead, Randy decides to go back after all.

Randy returns a full day before the experiment begins, but is unable to reach Mr. Landau or convince his own mother with a warning by phone. The masked man murders Randy, but Randy’s phone calls are what tip off the NSA to stakeout the lab.

While the others review more of the video camera footage in the present, Van Lang acquires a gas mask and black suit. Van Lang seemingly prepares to stalk the others, but another man in a similar disguise sneaks behind him and slits Van Lang’s throat. Jim wrestles with the killer while Grace pulls her gun and attempts arresting him, revealing herself to be an undercover NSA agent. The killer gets away. Although Grace disputes the accusation, Jim feels betrayed to discover his romantic relationship with Grace may have been a ruse.

Suspicious that Landau is the killer since he is the only person not currently accounted for, Jim, Grace, and Lewis search for him. They find a disc revealing that Landau came from the year 2029 and used his knowledge of the future to amass a fortune on the stock market while initiating the time travel project. They make an assumption that Landau is killing them to keep his secret. The trio also finds Randy’s body rotting in a locker.

Jim and Grace capture Landau. Landau claims he is not the killer and Lewis corroborates the claim with his video footage.

While Grace and Lewis continue investigating Lewis’ footage, Jim interrogates Landau. Landau claims that the real entity behind the time travel project and stock market scheme is Max Devlin, whose true identity is unknown in 2029. Landau felt guided into discovering the stock market disc as well as a perfected time machine in Destiny, Arizona. That 2029 technology was used to create the current iteration of the portal, but the inferior iteration in use now results in brain damage for anyone who uses it. Landau further claims that he decided to supplant Max Devlin by using all of the research and records he discovered for personal gain. Landau says that if they unmask the real killer, they will find Max Devlin.

The masked man initiates the self-destruct sequence. Jim works on overriding it. Grace tries escaping the lab with Lewis, but Lewis refuses to leave, claiming that they cannot alter fate.

The killer frees Landau and instructs him to press the red button “when the time comes.” The killer stabs Lewis and hands him the video camera with an instruction to give it to Jim.

Landau enters the control room and Jim holds him at gunpoint. As they argue, the portal activates and Bill comes through in a dazed state. Bill points his gun while regaining his senses. Landau and Jim both try rationalizing with Bill. Bill and Jim end up physically fighting. Landau activates the portal and decapitates Bill. Landau tells Jim that he now realizes Jim is Max Devlin and is going to use the disc to make a fortune and invent time travel. Jim is shocked and confused by the claim.

The killer fights with Grace in the hallway. Eventually, the killer removes his mask and Max Devlin is presumably confirmed to be another Jim with a bandage over a bloody eye.

Jim/Devlin takes Grace hostage and confronts Landau and Jim in the lab. Devlin shoots Landau and explains his plan to get rich after feeling betrayed by Grace and the rest of the research team. Devlin tells Jim that Jim doesn’t have a choice and must kill everyone to ensure his future as a man of wealth and means.

Grace stabs Devlin in the eye with a screwdriver, but he overpowers her. Devlin gives Jim a mask and black suit and instructs him to seize his destiny. Devlin drags Grace to the elevator while Jim goes through the portal and emerges at midnight, hiding as events play out the same way they already did and ensuring that he will fulfill his role as the killer.

Power is restored upstairs. Vukovich descends in the elevator with two armed men, but Devlin kills them. Grace and Devlin fight as the self-destruct countdown ends and the facility begins exploding. The elevator falls away, leaving Grace and Devlin to fight in the shaft as a fire rages below. The fight ends with Grace forcing Devlin to fall to his death.

Grace escapes with the stock market disc secretly in her possession. Rescued by Traxler, Grace’s true identity is revealed to be Special Agent Maxine Devlin.

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Review:

The M.I.T. misfits comprising Project 880 should be celebrating the successful first test of their experimental time machine.  Except when team member Jim returns from a quick trip of one hour into the future, he has a panicked report of a lab floor covered in blood, decapitated researchers, a self-destruct sequence set to explode the building, and a disguised killer determined to eliminate every last one of them.

How could things go so horribly wrong in only 60 minutes?  That’s exactly the mystery that the Project 880 team needs to solve if they are to avoid their ill-fated future, provided it is possible to redirect their fate at all.

With one multi-finger swipe, time travel thriller “Paradox” aims to scratch itches of science-fiction drama, fist meets face action, masked murderer whodunit, even “I was on a top secret undercover surveillance mission but really did fall in love with you” romance.  Despite this oversupply of ambition, “Paradox” earns only a C grade for execution because its small-scale script doesn’t have the originality and its under-delivered directing doesn’t have the energy to add up to more than an average effort.

The “Ten Little Indians” framework is fine for fostering initial intrigue, even if the overall storyline is populated by common archetypes that don't break new ground as far as duality conundrums and temporal paradoxes go.  A greater deficiency in the screenplay stems from dialogue.

“Showtime.  Party’s just getting started,” says an NSA agent on a stakeout.  “We’ve got a live one here,” comes from the clenched smile of a bad guy struggling to hold a captive.  Whenever characters aren’t choking on large paragraphs of exposition, which is often, they’re spitting up formulaic lines pulled from whatever action-thriller cliché template covers betrayed lovers, feuding partners, Mexican standoffs, red herring villainy, and the audience idiot surrogate telling babbling brainiacs to “now try English” with terms he can understand.

With time travel subject matter, one might assume potential hang-ups would relate to sorting out pseudo-science or mentally resolving logic implications of a timeline-hopping plot.  Detail issues in “Paradox” have less to do with how the title fits into the fiction and more to do with entirely different matters.

Outside of the movie, questions come from silly points such as wondering how a building could have only an electricity-powered elevator as the sole means of transportation between floors, an architectural impossibility.  Within the movie, distractions come from unmodulated performances allowing actors to sell shock/surprise with bulging eyes, dropped jaws, or similarly over-exaggerated expressions.  Norwegian-born Bjorn Alexander can’t seem to settle on whether or not to fully mask his natural accent.  Two other actors are physically and facially similar to the point of being indistinguishable until accepting the notion that one of them could be Eli Roth’s lookalike.

“Paradox” looks like a TV movie, which shouldn’t be surprising considering director Mike Hurst’s credits include made-for-cablers “House of the Dead 2” and “Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud” in addition to several episodes of the series “Femme Fatales.”  That shouldn’t be taken as a diss necessarily, merely an observation that “Paradox” feels like part of a Saturday syndication sandwich circa 1998 bookended by reruns of “Poltergeist: The Legacy” and “Earth: Final Conflict.”

It’s unclear who is intended to be impressed by “Paradox” other than Zoe Bell diehards.  For acts one and two, it’s refreshing to see Bell in a role actually freeing her to inhabit a core character instead of restricting her to being a stuntperson with dialogue.  Then the last third resorts to exploiting her calling card with an inevitable extended fistfight that ends up being among the least exciting scenes in the film.  For a Zoe Bell vehicle packing a much fiercer punch, track down “Raze” (review here).

Rather than a light bulb-flashing “aha!” or brain-teasing “wow!” moment, the final twist and big reveal of “Paradox” arrives with a shoulder-shrugging “eh.”  Complemented by a digital fire-filled finale that is more than just a little unconvincing, the film outs itself as having only enough oomph to be “just okay.”  In a surprisingly rich indie world of low-budget time travel thrillers with high entertainment value like “Synchronicity” (review here), “Extracted” (review here), “I’ll Follow You Down” (review here), “Time Lapse” (review here), and others, there simply isn’t enough depth to its mystery or to its production quality for “Paradox” to confidently compete with its superior peers.

Review Score:  50

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