Starring: Paul Walker (I), Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly

1 out of 10 stars

Stupendously awful, Timeline is a movie that parries where it should thrust, stumbles over its exposition, and makes even the exciting concept of time travel come off as pedestrian and rote. With its feet firmly in some strange corporate-land as opposed to the galaxy of sci-fi and fantasy fiction, Timeline so easily gives up the fantastical for the mundane that it readily interchanges the word "fax" with "time travel," giving the idea of crossing centuries a distinct resemblance to the transference of many smeared business documents. Well, I suppose that's one way to account for how the script turned out, which features such gems as "Yes, we have a back-up plan!" and "I don't care about the hows and whys!" Talk about the pot calling the medieval cauldron black.

While the film oeuvre that has sprung forth from Michael Crichton books has never been truly stellar – the only thing that saved Jurassic Park from B-moviedom was its special effects and Steven Spielberg's sadistic (and effective) scare tactics – Timeline is one particularly bad egg in the lot, jostling around its Crichton-esque plot points like sand until the shape is different, while the contents ultimately remain the same as those found in Disclosure, Congo, The 13th Warrior and the Jurassic Park flicks (now there's a lineage to be proud of!). There are the fervent professionals who are tops in their field, the shady corporation with tons of dough, the magical technology, the exotic location, the comely lass, the plucky lad, the requisite bad guy and scientific mumbo-jumbo that's supposed to make it all sounds smart and important. Here, the mumbo-jumbo takes the form of a human fax machine, the product of billionaire Robert Doniger (David Thewlis, catastrophically channeling Bill Gates) who for some reason is all excited about traveling back to 14th century France because…. well, because he has a ton of authentic French costumes hanging in his lab?

Nothing in Timeline is ever really spelled out properly, leaving you with only a vague sense of, um, time and place and just the barest whiff of character development. There's some ruins in Castlegard, France that…. changed the course of history? The archaeological dig is important because…. it's dusty? It's being financed because of… good grant writing? They're hoping to find… something exciting? The Scottish professor in charge of the dig (Billy Connolly) is ambiguously important, while his southern California son (Paul Walker) seems to be at the dig… to iron dad's shirts? Well, dad's off on a super secret mission, and when the two top archaeological helmet heads (Frances O'Connor and Gerard Butler, both trying to approximate geeky-chic) discover an ancient scroll written by the professor in 1357, questions and eyebrows are raised (after the requisite insertion of "carbon dating" and "authentic" into the dialogue). Soon, everyone's swooped over to Doniger's secret lab, where the aforementioned human fax machine looks like a disco room from Studio 54 (it's literally all smoke and mirrors) and they're informed of the possibilities of time travel.

Almost verbatim, the exposition of the time machine is as follows: "Blah blah wormhole, blah blah fax, blah blah rearranging particles, blah blah 14th century France, blah blah only six hours!" Sigh -- where's a true sci-fi professional like Mr. Spock when you really need him? Wrapped up in some designer peasant duds (Ms. O'Connor's frock is helpfully snug in the bust, while Mr. Walker sports the latest in serf-casual sportswear), they're zipped off to the land of knights and armor to find the hapless professor, each endowed with precious "markers" that can get them back to the 21st century (the markers are little pendants with a digital readout that look like a necklace-cum-stopwatch from the official Lord of the Rings online store). Of course, the mission of finding the professor is not as easy as it seems, and oh joy, they're just in time for some huge battle that … changes the course of history?

Said battle is the ostensible highlight of the movie, as we're treated to a phalanx of catapults, skies filled with arrows, lots of swordplay, and wooden shields and suits of armor that look like they got dusted off from a costume vault marked "1950-1959" (where exactly did this movie's $80 million go? Catering?). It's easy to theorize that director Richard Donner (helming his first flick since 1998's Lethal Weapon 4) was going for some kind of medieval verisimilitude in his action sequences, but the pyrotechnics and staging are uninspiring even by cable TV standards; you half expect King Arthur to pop out from behind a tapestry and save the day. Still, there are joys to be had, especially for connoisseurs of bad movies, who can find Monty Python-esque hilarity in the vanquishing of the bad guys, especially the "Night Arrow" sequence, in which we're informed not once but twice by the British of the impending under-the-cover-of-night projectiles. "Night arrows!" barks the egotistical British lord, echoed by some lackey in the background, sending the message to the archers. Once the deadly weapons are deployed and find their French targets, a helpful subtitle intones "Night arrows!" above the incoherent wails of the dying Gauls. Oh, so those were night arrows!

It would be hard to pick a worst performance in Timeline – in the mouths of all the leads, the name "Francois" comes out as something resembling "France-wah" -- but both his leaden delivery and failure to approximate a scream of pain in any realistic fashion do give Paul Walker the distinct advantage. In a movie of bad accents, Walker's is by far the worst – and he's speaking his native American! – though he's given a run for his money by O'Connor's flat line intonations (her exhortation of "I'm the best climber in the group!" gives credence to the rule that smart British women should never play dumb American girls) and Butler's distracting Scottish brogue, which seems to have been borrowed from Mike Myers (yes, I know Butler is really Scottish, but it doesn't keep him from sounding like Fat Bastard). Adding insult to injury is the casting of luminous British babe and accomplished actress Anna Friel as a scrappy Gallic noblewoman who spies for the good guys and spends half her time dirty and haggard, mumbling in French. Still, Walker's Valley Boy (San Fernando, not Dordogne) is the strangest person in this very strange land, though his lackluster, slack-jawed performance does hint at a technological breakthrough, as it gives hope that actors may have finally learned how to truly phone in -- or rather, fax in – their performances.