OUT OF TIME (2019)

OUT OF TIME (2019)

Tagline:  I think they would have had one, but ran out of time.

(Action, Drama, Sci-Fi) [PG-13]

Note: this movie doesn’t have an MPAA rating, but given the number of F-Bombs, I think it would have drawn a PG-13 rating. 

In this one, a secretive government agency loses track of 3 aliens that we're able to escape through a time portal in the 1950s. Agent Cooper (played by Blake Boyd) goes into the portal after them and they all end up in modern-day Los Angeles. The aliens need hosts to survive but every time they change bodies the person they leave dies. Their goal is to transmit the Earth’s location to an armada that will start an all-out assault on the Earth. Agent Cooper enlists the help of an LA detective named Lisa (played by Nadège August) who is one of the best detectives on the force. She believes she’s on a typical missing person case, but as events unravel, both of them realize the entire world is at stake. 

From the opening few scenes of this movie, it’s pretty clear that Nadège August is solid as heck taking a lead role in a movie and I wouldn’t be shocked if she gets bigger budget projects down the road. Blake Boyd is also pretty great in this playing an agent from the ’50s who isn’t used to all of the technology available today. 

Story-wise the pacing is very strong in this and it feels like every scene means something. We get decent backstories for both the main characters which means most people watching will be more emotionally connected with the film. Production-wise you can tell we have a low budget here. None of the effects are super cheesy, but you can tell they are avoiding using a ton of them since the aliens in the film all take human form. So you won’t want to go into this expecting a “creature feature” or even a movie with a ton of blood. Overall it’s pretty tame outside of the actual script. Cinematically this movie feels a bit like a student film and not something you would even get if were an Amazon or Hulu original. All of this makes the movie feel more like a long TV episode of something rather than a movie. 

Director Matt Handy does a good job with the story and conveying that on-screen with what he must have been given, but some camera work is jumbled rather than smooth when they are trying to capture multiple angles. This is also likely due to the budget. 

Having said all that, what we do get on screen is a solid outing with decent dialog and an intriguing storyline. Both August and Boyd have great chemistry with just enough humor thrown in to keep this movie from feeling overly burdened with dread or being so overly serious that it loses its ability to be fun. 

I give OUT OF TIME a solid 5 out of 7. It’s a pretty cool example of what you can do in the sci-fi cinematic world without a giant budget and overutilizing poor CGI.

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