Director: Nick Hamm
Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Lee Pace, Judy Greer, Michael Cudlitz
Have I Seen it Before: Never. In one of my Apple TV movie buying sprees, this one came across my radar, and I was probably more than a little helpless against its pitch.
Did I Like It: This is easily one of the top 4 films ever releaased that relied upon the Delorean Motor Car for a vital part of its plot.
Har. Har. Har.
It’s a reasonably entertaining deep dive into a story that—over forty years later—is even a bit of a one-line footnote in the making of time machines of note, but it isn’t reaching for much more than that. Sudekis is playing a slightly scuzzier version of his Ted Lasso personae, and Lee Pace is more than a little bit playing his character from Halt and Catch Fire, except with a grey wig. It’s a semi-amusing little trifle that you enjoy while wtching, but have no trouble understanding why it has become mostly forgotten in the years since.
I’m a little surprised that a film so dependent on the car with the gull-wing door, we never see one throughout the vast majority of of the runtime. Even John Delorean (Pace) himself is never seen driving one, as if he knew something we all expected way back when. Only at the end do we see someone—Sudekis, in one of the film’s less likely pontifications on what we know about the DeLorean sting operation—behind the wheel of the DMC-12, and even then it is played for something of joke, driving home the point that the car never really worked that well. Had this film somehow come before those other films that made the car famous, Zemeckis and Co. might have opted for some other totem for their time travel.
Come to think of it, the fact that this, a Universal production, managed to avoid any references to those other films is something of a marvel of restraint.
And now that I’ve gone this whole review without bringing it up, all I want to do is watch those three.