Time
might be relative, but family is a cold, hard absolute for Cassie Sinclair. She
is wracked with guilt for not fulfilling her mother’s dying wish, while
bitterly resenting her father’s disappearing act. She might be able to partly
rectify her past with the breakthrough time-travel equation she developed, but
first she will have to extricate herself from the time loop someone created through
their arrogant incompetence in Kenneth Mader’s Displacement (trailer
here),
which opens this Friday in Los Angeles.
It
was Sinclair who developed the equation, not her theoretical physicist father
or her kindly faculty advisor, Peter Deckard. However, both men now want it, so
they can find a negation point for the loop they are stuck in—or so they say.
However, Sinclair does not want to end the repeating cycle until she can
prevent her boyfriend Brian Chance’s fatal gunshot. Further complicating
matters, she is periodically captured and interrogated by a shadowy cabal (yes,
another one) that also wants the secret of time-travel for vaguely sketchy
military applications.
Displacement is a bit slow out
of the blocks, but once it starts looping back on itself, the energy and
tension pick up considerably. Mader slyly choreographs the crisscrossing paths
of the various Sinclairs from various times and he creates some highly credible
sounding physics mumbo-jumbo. Displacement
has few special effects of any sort, because it is driven by ideas, which
is cool. However, it is still a bit pedestrian looking.
Courtney
Hope convincingly portrays Sinclair as both wickedly smart and emotionally
damaged. Sarah Douglas (the super-villainess Ursa in Superman II) is almost too good as the Dr. Miles, the mysterious
co-conspirator trying to extract the equation from Sinclair. She is so poised
and polished, she almost makes viewers switch their allegiance to the quasi-governmental
faction. Veteran character actor Bruce Davison also inspires confidence as
Prof. Deckard, but Hope’s chemistry with Christopher Backus’s Chance always
feels forced and flat.
