2:22 (2017)

Directed by: Paul Currie | 99 minutes | action, thriller | Actors: Teresa Palmer, Michiel Huisman, Sam Reid, Maeve Dermody, Remy Hii, John Waters, Simone Kessell, Kerry Armstrong, Richard Davies, Marisa Lamonica, Jessica Clarke, Carma Sharon

Many try, but few Dutch actors actually get a foothold in Hollywood. After Carice van Houten, Michiel Huisman is our most famous ‘export product’ when it comes to actors. Huisman played his first English-language role in 2007 and mainly made a name for himself in America thanks to roles in well-received series such as “Treme”, “Nashville”, “Orphan Black” and of course “Game of Thrones”. He is also increasingly being cast for roles in feature films; he played with Brad Pitt in ‘World War Z’ (2013), with Reese Witherspoon in ‘Wild’ (2014) and with Blake Lively in ‘The Age of Adeline’ (2015). He was also featured in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 alongside Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen. Because you never know how long the success will last, Huisman forges the iron while it is hot. For the time being, he does not have to sit still, because there is enough in the pipeline for the born Amstelvener, including the comic drama ‘Irreplaceble You’ with Christopher Walken, among others, and the spy drama ‘The Red Sea Diving Resort’ with Ben Kingsley and Chris Evans. Huisman mainly plays supporting roles. An exception to that rule is the romantic mystery ‘2:22’ (2017), in which he, together with co-star Teresa Palmer, is the main attraction.

In ‘2:22’, the directorial debut of Australian Paul Currie – best known as producer of, among others, Mel Gibson’s 2016 war drama ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ – Huisman plays air traffic controller Dylan Branson, a man who sees patterns everywhere he goes. . Handy for work, but sometimes quite annoying in your private life. Especially because he also gets visions of people at New York Central Station, where disaster strikes at 2:22 am. One of those visions causes him to lose his mind at work, causing nearly two planes to crash into each other. Dylan is suspended. In the meantime, he meets Sarah (Teresa Palmer), who works as a curator at an art gallery. Dylan has no idea she was on one of the planes he nearly crashed into, so whether their meeting is just coincidental… Anyway, the two fall head over heels for each other, but his visions grow stronger by the day. , which does not exactly benefit the fledgling relationship. Dylan sees and hears patterns in almost all daily things, but the most powerful are the images of the same kind of people at the central station, where something terrible is about to happen at 2:22. Dylan feels like it depends on him; can he prevent this disaster?

Movies that play with time are as old as the road to Rome. ‘2:22’ is also a variant of this, even though the set-up is very different from, for example, a genre classic like ‘Groundhog Day’ (1993) because Dylan does not literally relive the same day every time. The film starts intriguingly, although thanks to a somewhat weighty voice-over, in which references are made to supernovas and other supernatural phenomena, it is immediately clear that Currie takes it all very seriously. A scene that is recognizable to us Dutch, in which Huisman crosses New York by bicycle to get to work, the stressful work in the air traffic control tower, the almost fatal mistake; they are scenes that try to draw us into the story and, to a certain extent, they do. Currie weaves some higher arts into his film – aerial ballet and multimedia installations – and with some modest visual tricks to emphasize the patterns Dylan sees, he tries to make it something original. But after half an hour, ‘2:22′ unfortunately goes completely off the rails from a narrative point of view, after which it doesn’t get any better.

In fact; screenwriters Todd Stein and Nathan Parker only make matters worse by jettisoning the entire credibility, explaining the plot to the bone, and even making it so fuzzy that the characters themselves don’t even know what they believe. Huisman is not to blame; there is little credit to be gained with such a script. And so we see him diligently scratching his patterns on the glass walls in his über-stylish apartment, having perfunctory dialogues with Palmer (with whom he also has little chemistry) and fooling around with colleagues who seem to have completely disappeared from the radar later in the film. (which by the way does not only apply to those colleagues). It is to be hoped for Huisman that this slip-up was a one-off and that his upcoming projects are of a higher level than this one of improbability and superfluous explanation.