The Film
What is up with Oscar winners and bad film choices? Cuba Gooding Jr. offers another phoned-in performance that suggests his 15 minutes of fame has run out. Fittingly this is so in the straight to Blu-ray time-travel thriller Ticking Clock, which seems to have done its own time travel by skipping theaters. Even at a fairly short 101 minutes, the film may have you looking at your ticking watch.
A down-on-his luck investigative reporter (Gooding) specializing in brutal murders walks too far in the middle of a strange string of murders and gets sucked into the investigation himself. The same can't be said for being sucked into this story, which thankfully eventually winds down and ends.
The Picture
Perhaps Ticking Clock was filmed during a period of overcast days; either that or the cinematographer didn't let his gels go to waste while shooting this one. The film maintains a gray, faded look that actually fits with the faded story and performances. When color was, in fact, present, it almost looked artificial, making this a rather unpleasant film to view. Skin tones were ashy and, as with the rest of the scenery, gray. It appeared as if the film itself had been the victim of time and faded before the transfer to 1080p high definition Blu-ray in a standard widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio.
In one scene in particular, Lewis Hicks (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and James (Austin Abrams) walk in from an apparently sunny day, in the next scene the view out the window clearly shows it's raining. The discontinuity carries throughout the film.
The Sound
Much like the picture, sound ends up suffering by time as well. Dialog is often muffled, as if it's down a hallway or through a tunnel, making it obvious that much of the sound was looped in after the fact, and not particularly well. Even with 5.1 channel DTS-HD Master Audio on board, it sounds like there's a filter that causes distortion rather than making dialog clearer. This is more noticeable in some scenes than others, but "muddled" sums up the sound and oh, so much more.
The Extras
Well, there really aren't any - perhaps they were also lost somewhere in time. Sony's movieIQ feature is present, which allows users to connect to the Internet to download content and give feedback through an exclusive survey. There are also previews for a handful of movies. If you're expecting to look through time or read Keene (Neal McDonough)'s disturbing journal, you won't find it.
Final Thoughts
It's surprising that a movie with a good level of talent including Academy Award Winner Cuba Gooding Jr. comes off so lackluster. The acting at times appears forced, but likely everyone involved was watching their own watches while waiting for the next gig. Even when the story gets moving, there is too much "history" that has to be called up in the dialog to fill viewers in on why Detective Ed Beker (Yancey Arias) dislikes Hicks with a passion. This happens repeatedly throughout the film, and in the end this one goes nowhere... all too slowly.
Product Details
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