大象传媒

Oscar darling Hilary Swank is part of a wasted ensemble in 11:14, a low budget black-comedy thriller by writer/director Greg Marcks. The film counts down the seconds to a freak road accident from a range of different perspectives, but instead of playing out the action with rounded characters, the cast are used simply as props for a routine exercise in plotting.

Like a Swiss watch, the film ticks over with a neat configuration of moving parts but the results are utterly unsurprising.

Even the gags aren't as clever as Marcks supposes. Trying to squeeze laughs out of severed appendages and a game of pass-the-parcel with a dead body reeks of desperation (and about ten other films before this one). In the same way, the characters' exploits feel shoehorned to fit the plot. Even the talented Ms Swank can't convince, playing a shop assistant who refuses to help her colleague rob the till, then changes her mind and is shot in the arm as a cover-up.

"THERE'S NO SENSE OF THIS GOING ANYWHERE"

Swank crosses paths with Henry Thomas as a hit-and-run driver whose night is impacted by Patrick Swayze's concerned dad, who in turn falls foul of Colin Hanks as a delinquent teen, who says 'Hi' to Rachael Leigh Cook playing a junior femme fatale... There is no sense of this story going anywhere. Each carefully calculated intersection reveals nothing of any consequence, because the characters are so poorly sketched. In the end, all that Marcks achieves with this manipulation of time is making 86 minutes feel like three hours.