“I’m a woman! We don’t say what we want! But we reserve the right to get pissed off if we don’t get it. That’s what makes us so fascinating! And not a little bit scary.”

Justin’s rating: This is what The Butterfly Effect’s been warning us about for decades now!

Justin’s review: Do you ever see movies not because you have an actual interest in them, but because they won’t stop popping up in your life until you finally surrender? That’s me and Sliding Doors. I am not the president nor paying dues member of any Gweneth Paltrow fan club, so I was fine letting this British rom-drama pass by in the ’90s.

But then it wouldn’t stop stalking me, sometimes standing outside my window and demurely tapping on the glass while taking a break to film an infomercial for Paltrow’s Goop. Man, remember Goop? That’s officially the point where God said, “OK, start the apocalypse countdown.” Anyway, I kept bumping into Sliding Doors in lists and mentions and Tubi’s deliberate determination that this was the be-all cure for my mental state, and today I’m giving in. I’m watching this sucker, just to have it in my rear view mirror.

Goopy Doors. Gweneth Pout-row. Britishisms. I best take this at a headlong run.

Paltrow is Helen, a London resident who’s certainly grown up in England her entire life and undeniably has an authentic accent. Please do not doubt her accent. On a particularly strange day, Helen is fired because she borrowed four bottles of vodka from work and then replaced them.

It’s a strange reason to fire someone, but let’s breeze past that to where all this gets weird, which is that her world gets split into two parallel universes: one in which she makes it through the subway doors of a train home and one which she doesn’t. There’s a little girl involved in this with magical soundtrack tinkles, so I’m guessing she’s the evil genius behind this.

From here on out, the two universes play out differently. In the one where she makes the train, she bumps into a new love interest (John Hannah), finds out her boyfriend’s been cheating on her, gets a new haircut, and starts her own business. In the other, she gets mugged, goes to the hospital, and generally continues to have a crappy life with her crappy, mooching, two-timing boyfriend. Oh, and she gets braided pigtails.

A brief pause to ruminate on why we never really saw Jeanne Tripplehorn — who plays the sinister shrew here — past the ’90s in major motion pictures. I guess we started traveling in different circles, but I’ll always remember Waterworld. Ah, maybe I just answered my own question.

The “two universes” twist makes for a particularly challenging job for Sliding Doors’ editor. Even though this movie keeps flipping back and forth between the worlds as the timeline goes forward, it does a fabulous job keeping the two straight and finding interesting ways to contrast the two and have the scenes crash and cut together.

I do wish that the story was more interesting and that I was more invested in it, because this is a pretty cool concept. It brings to mind time travel or time loop movies, where we learn what should’ve happened and then see alternate versions for those “what if” comparisons.

It’s never explained what’s going on, exactly, but this film hints that the universes are connected somehow, or that the two Helens sense each other. Perhaps Goop is calling the shots.

Pinning a genre on this one is a tricky business indeed. It’s halfway a lot of things and fullway none of them. Romance? Well sure, it’s kind of a love… quadrangle, but since there are two parallel plots, it’s hard to point at one and call it the definitive love story. There’s a smattering of humor, mostly by Hannah, but it’s not nearly enough to push this into romcom territory. Sappy drama oozes onto each page of the script, punctuated by tours around late-90s London. And then, as I mentioned previously, is the specter of the fantastical.

I guess you get two movies in one here, so if you hate one of the timelines — and that’s going to be the obvious bummer one — you merely have to wait a minute until it switches over to something different.

Unfortunately, it never gels the way that it clearly wants to. Hannah is funny, Paltrow is a generic love interest, and the humor kind of stingy and the stories aren’t that deep. The “what if” concept is interesting, but I couldn’t get over how incredibly unlikable several of these characters were.

And without spoiling too much, it kind of has not one, but two downer endings. I don’t ask much of romcoms: Characters that connect with my sensibilities, a decent amount of jokes, and a happily-ever-after finale. I don’t need to be depressed twice over.

Of course, if Helen ever needs more lives, she could just run into more doors and make more copies. That way she’s immortal! GWENETH PALTROW IS YOUR MULTIVERSE GOOP OVERLORD RAWR

Maybe in another universe I saw this movie and passed it by like I always do. Somehow, I don’t think my life would be that much different.

Intermission!

• Wait, she’s such good friends with the baker that he comes out to the sidewalk to give her donuts and a little cheek smooch? How often is she frequenting this place? Why does she not weigh 500 pounds?
• At least the opening song is peppy
• Magical tinkles!
• Babies indoctrinated with Beatles music in the womb should be called “Featles” and the screenwriter should’ve received the death penalty for that pun
• “I got sacked. So did you, so it seems.”
• “You did a joke in the middle of your turbulent emotional state.”
• “You’ve been sitting here looking like suicide on a stick for a week.”
• This movie remembers what public pay phones are
• You’re killing Monty Python for me
• Dang, those are some chunky 1998 CRT monitors
• “They’re having some kind of sponsored schizophrenic fit.”
• Seinfeld reference!
• Nobody in this film is willing to let a phone call to voicemail if they’re in the middle of a conversation
• If you run around London enough, you’ll easily find the person you’re seeking