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80Gracefully directed by Robert Schwentke, the film has a perfect performance by Bana, rangy and haunted, never at home in his body.
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75The movie is slightly more sappy, and the characters are necessarily less fleshed out than they are in Audrey Niffenegger's dazzling novel, but neither shortcoming detracts from the film's appeal.
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75It would really help to get into the right frame of mind before seeing The Time Traveler's Wife, because viewed from some angles - maybe most angles - the movie is ridiculous.
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75The book is richer, but this is a solid, endearing telling of the same essential story, and is well worth the price of admission for those who appreciate romantic fantasy.
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70May not make a lick of sense, but it does make for fairly irresistible nonsense.
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What makes The Time Traveler's Wife work as drama, though, and certainly better than it might have, is an unhesitating emotional commitment on the part of the actors (and Schwentke).
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67Bana and McAdams are sweet together, with matching dimples and starry eyes, and we grow eager to see them remain in the same place. In the end, that's all there is to the movie, really. It's a time-travel fantasy in search of a cozy love seat.
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63The warmth of the actors makes it surprisingly tender, considering the premise that is blatantly absurd. If you allow yourself to think for one moment of the paradoxes, contradictions and logical difficulties involved, you will be lost. The movie supports no objective thought.
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63At its best, The Time Traveler's Wife does suggest the preciousness of a life that's too often beyond our control. At its worst, it's more than a little nuts.
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60German-born director Robert Schwentke ("Flightplan") keep things moving briskly enough so that the leaps in time mostly obscure the leaps in logic.
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60Competent and well-cast, but it crams too much into the runtime and loses the elegance of the novel.
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60It's soppy enough to suit the requirements of the weepie genre...But the movie also has an aching solidity that allows you to surrender to its cuddly-creepy feelings without hating yourself in the morning.
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50The emotions and crises feel pre-sanded, smooth to the point of blandness.
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50A syrupy and extraordinarily ridiculous adaptation.
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50A slog rather than the sweeping romance it aspires to be.
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50The Time Traveler's Wife slips the romance cards into a stacked deck – read 'em if you will, but no need to weep.
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50It might be a solid hook if we thought their love was grand. Instead, it's kind of creepy.
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50"Caution: Contents may induce brain bleed." That is, if you think too hard on the logic and mechanics of its time-travel conceit.
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50Although it's supposed to be supremely romantic, there's no daring in it, no go-for-broke passion. It's a nice little movie about romantic compulsion, just big enough to fit in a teacup.
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When the film's fate rests on the alchemy of its stars, you really don't want to get that wrong. But here, chemistry is a problem, and it proves a significant one.
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50There's something curiously off about The Time Traveler's Wife.
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50Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin won an Oscar for "Ghost" (1990), a pleasant, moderately thoughtful weepie that this movie closely resembles.
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42The story is still mostly fabulous, and its novelty helps carry the film, but this still comes across like a poor high-school stage version: sincere and kind of sweet, but endlessly clumsy.
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Will disappoint anyone looking for transport from a movie--being a time traveler's wife, it turns out, is mostly a drag.
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40Often ridiculous, awkward, unsatisfying and dour melodramatic adaptation.
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The movie moves at such an agonizingly stately pace that by the end, side effects be damned, Henry's time-traveling gene starts to look mighty appealing.
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38The movie doesn't really begin or end. Whether the lights have just gone down or the credits have begun to roll, things are pretty much the same for Henry.
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30McAdams glows, as always, but Bana looks drained: I guess all that time-shifting leaves its mark on the complexion as well as the soul.
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25I'd watch the vibrant Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana in anything, but The Time Traveler's Wife is pushing it.
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20The cozy sentimentality in The Time Traveler's Wife is the only thing that grounds it. Mostly it's just featherheaded.
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16They miss by a mile – or should I say, a light-year.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 22 out of 30
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Mixed: 5 out of 30
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Negative: 3 out of 30
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Ssmith10I loved this movie; the beautiful direction, the acting, the story.
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BillyS5