I caught a screening of Time Addicts at Monster Fest this October. I saw a film which was lovingly crafted by people with a true passion for cinema, and a movie that was, for the most part, very technically proficient. The cinematography in particular was particularly solid, though the occasional shot did linger for too long a time. And the cast did a very strong job making their characters reasonably believable.
Unfortunately, I also saw a film which agitated me in a number of ways, and most of this came down to the screenplay.
Time Addicts is a film which tries to balance a real Aussie sense of humour with another attempt to be a serious thriller about drug addiction, paranoia and time travel. The film plays out very seriously but every line of dialogue is overly aggressive in its effort to be comedic banter and never feels like an organic line of dialogue, even with a cast that play it off very naturally.
In a respectable effort to keep the film contained to a single location, Time Addicts drags out its scenes for too long at a time and stretches its thin premise for a long time and often with a very slow pace. As such, the momentum never really feels like it kicks off. It often feels like writer-director Sam Odlum saw the 2019 time travel movie "Synchronic", another movie about a drug that makes people travel through time, and thought to himself "I would tell that story differently". He has some decent ambitions and exhibits sense of visual style in doing so, but he fails to find the narrative momentum to make a compelling story out of it. Time Addicts is certainly not a predictable film as it goes in a number of directions one might not anticipate, but I found it was often directions that were too ridiculous for me to believe on any level, even in a story where I can suspend disbelief enough to accept a drug that creates time travel. Whilst Synchronic explored way more possibilities, and naturally had a higher budget to allow it to do so, Time Addicts constantly had me very aware that we were inside a single location in the present day, and not in the past or the future as the story would want you to believe. And with very few characters in the story, the empty backgrounds of the same reused house were constantly on display. I respect that this film wanted to make use of a single location, but I ultimately wasn't captivated enough by the story or the script to take my attention away from this.
Ultimately, the biggest problem lies with the protagonist, who is ironically and unironically the antagonist of the film at the same time. Charles Grounds portrays Johnny very believably, even too believably for a character whose dialogue is inorganic and desperate to be funny. He was so believable that he actually reminded me of two people I've met in life my life, let's call them "Luke" and "Trevor". Luke was a paranoid meth addict I knew and eventually began to despise for his constant mistreatment of my friend whom he kept in a toxic relationship. And like Trevor, Grounds' character Johnny drags his girlfriend into the entire ordeal of the movie through his selfish habits. Supposedly, I'm meant to have a fraction of concern for his well-being. But like his real life counterpart "Luke", why should I care about this guy? He's selfish and genuinely unlikable as a person. If anything, I should want him to suffer at the hands of the drug dealer threatening to sever his thumbs. And I do. If Charles got his thumbs cut off in the first ten minutes of the film, then I'd be a happier person. Instead I sat through a lot of long, slow sequences where he was the only one talking, or one of the visibly few characters in the universe of the film. But the real issue came from the fact that every line of dialogue he said felt like it was meant to be the punchline in an episode of "The Big Lez Show" without any sense of believability, or genuine laughter. The audience around me chuckled quite a lot and enjoyed the sense of humour, so there is certainly an audience for it (and it was a sold out theatre too, so it was an inspired and large audience) but I wasn't that audience. I honestly just wished he would shut his drug-induced mouth. That's the same thought I had about my friend "Trevor" the last time he took three tabs of Acid. I just wished he'd shut up, but to his credit there was at least a rhythm to what he was saying, something that Johnny was lacking. Johnny is a poorly written character with a great actor who makes him so believable that it's often unbearable, but to have him written to be so intentionally unlikable and have him constantly say dialogue so artificial and annoying that it's like a cheese grater to the ear, it was not a comfortable experience to have to sit through a feature length runtime trapped in a cinema with him.
Ultimately, I failed to see the film all the way through. About halfway through, poised between remaining in a cinema with a character I couldn't stand and a movie that barely moved, I made the decision to get up and leave. I tried my best to see it through, but I didn't want to spend any more time with an agitating drug addict that would neither capture my sympathy nor make me laugh at any point. I wanted to support the filmmaker because he showed a lot of merit as a director and a knack for keeping a budgetary production as one with solid technical flare, as well as for the fact that it's not fair to judge a film completely unless you've seen it all the way through. All that being said, without a protagonist I could bear to be around I just found myself wanting to get out of the cinema quickly, no matter how many times I said to myself "just give it a chance".
Time Bandits is definitely a step in the right direction for Sam Odlum and I look forward to seeing where he goes from here. With more attention to tonal balance, likeable characters and believable dialogue, I can see his full potential blossoming into something great. I hope his sophomore effort takes everything that worked about this film and grows in a number of ways I felt this one came up short.
