• Directed by Jonathan Heap
• Written by John Penney
• Starring
  • Eric Roberts
  • Laurie Holden
  • Nick Mancuso
  • Saul Rubinek

Before I looked him up, I hadn’t realized how much work Eric Roberts is getting. The IMDb lists him with 30 movies to his credit (or something) since 1990, with 11 in 1999 alone. He seems to be edging out Roddy Piper as the likeable tough guy of choice for mid-budget movies. (No! No one will ever replace Rowdy Roddy Piper, paragon of all that is masculine!)

This is actually an enjoyable little movie, with serviceable performances, good production values, and a couple of interesting time travel twists.

We open with a brief interlude in the future: Four individuals have been found guilty in absentia of 32 counts of armed robbery, 7 counts of 2nd-degree murder, and 12 counts of 1st-degree murder; the judge sentences them to be submitted to The Program.

In the present, we cut to an unexpectedly effective scene. A young sociopath is robbing the body of a woman he just killed in her car — while in the passenger seat, a three-year-old screams and screams. (Okay, maybe this is more wrenching for those of us with young children; for whatever reason, it served as a great setup.) Tough detective Dylan Cooper (Roberts) shows up on the scene. You know his character template in a heartbeat: vintage 70s muscle car and a belt buckle the size of a drink lid at McDonald’s. The kid brags that he’s scot-free; he’s underage, so he’ll be back on the streets before Dylan could finish his paperwork. Dylan’s solution is simple; he tosses the kid a gun, and when he goes for it, Dylan blows him away.

After that, we get down to the plot: A foursome of teens gone bad (with nicknames like “Skull,” “Blade,” “Drive-By” and “Shy Girl”) steal a cache of guns from a meth lab (with a big firefight ensuing) and sell the firearms to schoolkids. A patrolcar and Dylan show up, there’s the requisite firefight (and a credible chopper stunt), and Dylan catches one punk, a kid named Rusty (aka “Drive-By”).

Meanwhile… Three ominous figures in black appear in a weird lightshow.

At the station, Dylan butts heads with the juvie officer, who says that Rusty is “basically a good kid.” (That stopped when he pulled a gun on a cop, says Dylan.) Dylan and his partner, Ally (the beautiful Laurie Holden) start working on tracking down Rusty’s friends from their nicknames. But…

The mysterious three keep beating them there. Naturally, they are the execution team from the future, sent back to kill these three before they commit the crimes they were (will be?) convicted of. They are Zoe, a black woman who uses a big-ass robotic arm as a weapon; the Bookkeeper (Saul Rubinek — always a mark of quality), whose job it is to read the sentence and bear witness to the execution; and Stone (Nick Mancuso), the actual executor, who takes a grim pleasure from his work. He also has the nasty habit of collecting an eyeball from each of his executees. (Apparently they used to collect them to do a retinal scan back home to prove the kill; now he just does it for the trophy.)

Much of the rest of the movie is Dylan and Ally trying to get to the kids before the future boys do, though Dylan is seriously conflicted; shouldn’t he just let them be executed to prevent the mayhem they’ll cause in the future?

There’s one nifty time travel twist here: According to Stone, flesh cannot exist outside its own time frame. Thus, each of the time travelers is wearing a full body sheath of invisible plastic (i.e., a thin coating of latex rubber), including in their lungs; when this is compromised (as when Dylan stabs Zoe in the arm), they instantly regress to the age they actually were in 1998 — which, in Zoe’s case, regresses her right out of existence.

It’s an intriguing premise, and the hint of an ethical quandary certainly brings it above a mere sci-fi shootemup. Nevertheless, there are two things that annoyed me:

1) Too much filler. Dylan’s opening scene, for example, is never mentioned again; and while it’s a terrific introduction into the sociopathic teen mindset that we’ll be dealing with for the next ninety minutes, it doesn’t actually impact the plot. In the same vein, there’s a twenty minute segment in the middle of the movie when Ally and Rusty are on the run; Rusty just happens to be seen by one of the meth-lab goons, who takes a friend and pursues them through the city, causing a shootout in a back alley and a restaurant. The entire scene is branded “filler”; it could have been excised completely, and, aside from trimming the running time below that expected for features, wouldn’t have been missed.

2) There’s a simplistically bleeding-heart morality to the ending. It turns out that, when Rusty makes one monumental decision not to shoot a certain person at a certain time, his entire future history of crime is erased from the Bookkeeper’s little computer. (Which has its own problems — since he supposedly committed the crimes along with his now-dead cohorts, wouldn’t that list have changed anyway?) Dylan uses this as an argument to Stone that The Program doesn’t work; these kids can all change if given the chance. (Dylan is a prime example of this; he was a punk kid, too, and almost got popped by his own cop father before he turned his life around.)

Now, I’m usually one to argue for erring on the side of compassion, but there’s a limit here. If we take Rusty as a representative sample here, then there is one decisive point in each youth’s life at which they can reject their future life of crime. But does that mean that these future intervention teams will be able to tell when that moment is? That they’ll be able to analyze each future criminal’s life, find a single deciding moment at which they can change things, and somehow know what action will change the youth’s life? Conversely, if the future life of crime stems from a long-term exposure to unsavory nature/nurture elements (as would seem much more likely), does that mean that a constant string of interventions will be necessary to turn “at-risk” children from future criminal activity? Sorry to say, we already know that doesn’t work too well; we’ve already got social programs up the wazoo. Why would a time traveler be a better influence on a youth than a present-day social worker or Mentor? Not to mention, the latter option of micro-managing every life strikes me as a lot more intrusively fascist than The Program.

Yeah, I know, I make way too big a deal of out this, but when a movie goes to such lengths to add an ethical dilemma to its storyline, it should expect the final resolution to be put to close scrutiny.

But even including these annoyances, Past Perfect is a fun ride, and the fact that I could spout on at length about ethical dilemmas shows that it’s at least moderately thought-provoking.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 16
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 9
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Saul Rubinek (the Bookkeeper) was “Kivas Fajo,” the obsessive collector, in the TNG 2nd-season episode “The Most Toys”