This was a terrible, terrible movie. It’s basically satisfying on a sci-fi nerdlet level, in which a cool premise is played around with, but on every other level it fails. Badly.
The acting is TV level in everyone but the leads. Gyllenhall and Formiga are appealing, but everyone else makes boring, safe choices. The pretty young thing is pretty damn unbelievable, and seems to be acting like a ‘sassy funny friend’ more than an average, interesting lady. Everything she did felt like she was trying really hard to seem real. The evil scientist guy was terrible, with a comic-booky sneer in his voice.
The script was basically interesting, but everyone is a giant caricature. The evil head scientist who only cares for his project. The nerdy tech guy. The caring, mothering woman at the controls. The plucky young hero who just wants to do the right thing. Nothing interesting about any of them, and nothing tying them together in any interesting ways. Why didn’t the head scientist embody some traits of the father of the young man, so he had to wrestle with his issues with his father, maybe try to please the scientist guy as well as carry out his mission? Why not have him struggle to come to terms with his inability to please his father (or whatever) as well as defuse this bomb thing? Why include the fucking father at ALL?
Oh, because there’s not really a true, cohesive script here, there’s a big pile of maudlin pap injected into the heart of a lean little science fiction story. You get one ending, you fucking chumps, just one, and the one you’re stuck with is the horrible freeze-frame cheese-o-thon. Once you do that one, you can never earn your ‘bad-ass sci-fi ending’ where it’s all real and totally wicked that new realities are created, man (completely breaking the rules already set up earlier, but never mind that). No matter what you do, you can’t earn the ‘bad-ass sci-fi ending’. You lost it when you had the frozen good-looking multiracial train car yukking it up to bad comedy.
What a pile of crap. It’s so disappointing to have a cool premise ruined by substandard writing and execution. The fundamentals are all there; a director who obviously knows how to stage tension, keep up a good pace, and keep an audience guessing, an appealing lead who manages to convey the craziness of his situation as well as his desperation to fix it, and a basic premise that brings up cool ideas about the interactions between multiple worlds and the limits of free will. This all could have worked if the script and director hadn’t chickened out and gone for a hackneyed sell-out version. You can keep your freeze-frame, you fucking hack.
Edit. This guy from NPR gets it:
The last 10 or 15 minutes of Source Code feel like bad studio notes followed to the letter, with all that careful, rigorous sci-fi world-building tossed out and replaced by another lame paean to the transcendent power of free will. (See also: The Adjustment Bureau.) Based on its thrillingly fractured first half — not to mention Moon in its entirety — Jones seems much smarter than he allows the film to be in the end. It wriggles out of its own intriguing puzzle.