“Fire or no fire, 11,369 people need to die.”

Justin’s rating: So many uncomfortable angles about this coming out two years before 9/11

Justin’s review: I always felt a little bit bad that Casper Van Dien wasn’t able to better leverage his role in Starship Troopers to a more famous career. Yet when I took a look at his filmography, I saw an actor who’s stayed really busy over the past few decades and had a couple of decent follow-ups (such as 1999’s Sleepy Hollow).

So maybe I need to stop feeling quite so sorry for him and more for myself, because I had to sit through his Thrill Seekers (also known as Time Shifters). Van Dien plays ace reporter Tom Merrick, who’s now slumming at a tabloid because his cutthroat attitude got a news team killed in an exploding power plant that he refused to vacate. As he does the world’s laziest google search on a piece about historical disasters, he notices a very odd man who seems to be popping up at several of them.

Merrick takes a plane ride to go investigate, and wouldn’t you know it, the weird guy is sitting two aisles over! It turns out that weird guy is a time tourist who gets to visit major (and somewhat middling) catastrophes to view human suffering first-hand, I guess. During a scuffle, Merrick ends up sort-of hijacking the plane and saving it from a major disaster.

Since this ended up monkeying with the timeline, it draws the unwanted attention of a 2070 agency known as Thrill Seekers (hey, that’s the title of the film!) AND the FBI. As Merrick goes on the run with his brand-new co-worker (Catherine Bell, wishing she had picked a role with less cardio), there’s a chance they may be able to stop yet more catastrophes on a subway and in a colosseum.

Yet it’s not very clear that this is what they should be doing. Martin Sheen, taking a break from the set of West Wing, literally phones it in as Future Boss to inform the Thrill Seekers agents that Merrick’s interference has caused no shortage of horrible changes to the timeline — up to and including half of California being “melted” from a fusion disaster and the inventor of the time machine being killed as a kid.

I’ll admit that this is a pretty great setup (even though it takes a full hour for the film to get there). Whether Merrick succeeds in saving people or the future people succeed in making sure the disasters go through as planned, someone’s out of luck. Both sides spend a bit of time debating the ethical issues even as their plots converge. It’s the Trolley Problem on a larger scale and had me really interested to see whether or not this movie could stick the landing without flinching (answer: …sort of?).

It’s passable enough entertainment, but Thrill Seekers suffers from three problems. First, the 1992 flick Timescape did this whole concept way, way better — and with Jeff Daniels. Second, there’s a patina of shaky acting and low budget that can’t be ignored. And third, I always consider it a capital crime when a time travel movie doesn’t actually feature our characters taking advantage of the technology to hope around to different historical epochs.

Even so, there are moments — a line here, a camera choice there, a Matrix Trinity-lookalike in the wings — that kept me involved all the way to the end. The last 15 minutes are genuinely surprising and infused with a few fun twists. This dish of scifi cheese has some nice nuggets of meat to enjoy, and that makes it a very cautious recommend from me.

Intermission!

• If your apartment is harboring these shameless cockroaches, it’s time to clean
• It’s always a good idea to film live news footage from inside an exploding, collapsing power plant
• You can threaten to fire people if they don’t stay in said exploding power plant
• “Devil babies and resurrected dictators are out!”
• “I’m Tom Merrick” “And I’m overjoyed!”
• This tabloid only has one computer terminal for research? They gotta share it?
• This is the messiest google search ever — and it’s a good thing that “zoom and enhance” works with ancient photographs!
• Tabloids fly reporters coach class
• Remember when you had to use credit cards to use airplane phones? And when kids played Quake? This movie does!
• Future time travel agencies use paper brochures
• Maybe don’t pick up the stranger’s gun and start waving it around?
• Digital recorders in watches must’ve seemed so futuristic in 1999
• Future people wear sunglasses inside
• Her pistol is a rocket launcher? That’s subtle and low profile.
• Foldable tablets!
• Yelling “OPEN UP!” at a dead engineer weirdly doesn’t do anything
• Future Guy gets to enjoy a death first-hand
• HA the FBI agent is giving “The Fugitive” speech
• Southern California gets wiped out in a fusion meltdown in the future
• You can simply fling yourself down to the ground next to an exploding car and be perfectly OK
• “They are people!” “THEY ARE DUST!”
• I got a chuckle that all the dead people just have a bit of ash smeared on them but otherwise they look perfectly normal for folks that were exploded AND burned alive
• The rocket gun also makes people disappear when shot?
• DANG a last-minute plot revelation I did *not* see coming