When it comes to time travel in movies and television shows, I’m like Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon franchise, “I’m getting too old for this shit,” and Paradox is not the exception to the rule. Paradox is rated as if it was a television movie, but apparently it was in theaters then on demand. It is about a group of scientists who have succeeded in traveling one hour into the future after getting funding from a mysterious private investor. They are unaware that the NSA is watching them, and that success could mean the beginning of the end when they begin to be murdered one by one. Who could be killing them and why?
Paradox was a murder mystery with a sci fi premise, and I hate murder mysteries! I don’t care who did it although I narrowed it down fairly accurately within the first few minutes. Because the characters were so poorly written, I did not care who was dying or knew who they were when they did. They are all archetypes. The writers and actors made one guy seem so clearly like the jerk in the group that when the dialogue pointed to another character as the least favorite, I could not buy it. At least the director should have told him to ease up a little. To be fair, none of the characters had an affable bone in their body, but they were also boring. If they were disreputable, magnificent bastards, at least it would have been worth watching.
Paradox is so bad that there was a point early in the movie when I no longer cared what the answers were, and just decided to let it roll so the whole awful mess could end sooner. I figured that the story just sucked, and that I would be angry if I actually took it seriously by following the narrative closely. I analyze everything. My brain hit the safety to protect me from this nonsense, and even then I managed to notice a few plot holes, specifically the elevator murder. Why did I keep watching it? Zoe Bell, who is one of the best living stuntwomen turned actor in our time so I had a sliver of hope that at least there would be great fight scenes. Sadly I was wrong so this movie was soup to nuts a piece of crap for at least not taking advantage of casting a legend then letting her loose with the flimsiest excuse. I waited for sixty-seven minutes for one of her fights, and it was not even a good one. It was a ninety-minute movie. I wasted my life, y’all.
Instead Paradox decides that the star should be (and please don’t take this personally, sir) Adam Huss. Who? He has been in the biz called show since 2001, but with such greats as Quentin Tarantino, Drew Barrymore or Sam Raimi? No. Is that his fault? Not at all. A lot of professional success can be attributed to luck. Huss could be the next insert name of great actor here. In this film, no one did his or her personal best, which means that everyone equally had a chance to do better than the actual work deserved, i.e. be Michael Fassbender in the horrible Alien prequel movies or X-Men reboots, and find a way to stand out. Huss did not. So I do not intend to single Huss out, but he is clearly playing the character that the filmmakers are most interested in for absolutely no discernible reason.
If Paradox was not made for the sake of being great art, then at least make money. The logical step is to put your most famous actors on the marquee, which even according to the promotional poster, were Bell and Malik Yoba, whom I know most recently from being dragged in social media, but also for being a series regular on Alphas; however everyone else with a childhood knows him from New York Undercover. Yoba had a smaller role than Bell, who at least was the lead supporting actor with Huss. Any movie that does not use its scene stealers and notable stars to their fullest potential has left money on the ground. Shame on them.
Paradox suffers from bad acting and bad writing. I love profanity as an emotional punctuation and time saver, but the use of profanity in this film was a poor substitute for character establishment and development. The film wanted to impress us with how hard the scientists were, but instead it felt redundant and made me question how this group could have been socially functional enough to succeed at getting together a food order, forget achieving time travel. Also the writers seemed rather taken with cherry Kool-Aid.
Paradox is also visually underwhelming. The fire special effects were so unconvincing that it should have been written out. There is nothing cool or memorable other than its paucity of credibility to make this alleged sci fi film worth mentioning.
There is a twist at the end of Paradox that I would have considered cooler if Yoba’s character was fleshed out more, but it was not. The movie should have started earlier and focused on him instead of starting with time travel. He gets a brief homage/rip-off to 12 Monkeys, the Bruce Willis helmed movie, not the television series, which I never got around to finishing and would have been a better use of my time than watching this movie. Unfortunately at that point, the film is over, and no one proofreading or shooting the script realized that it was the most interesting part of the story, scraped everything from there and worked backwards from that point on even if it meant letting the murder mystery take a back seat. In other words, make a completely different film. Sometimes forgetting to hit save on your computer can be your friend. You must kill your darlings.
Instead Paradox killed its viewers’ brain cells by making a movie that would have been better if it was never made. It is not the worst movie that I ever saw because at least then it would be memorable. It is just blah. Bell and Yoba deserved better and were criminally underutilized. Everyone else needs to look at themselves hard in the mirror and like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, give themselves a talking to so they can do better next time. Be Fassbender!