“You mess with the past—you get screwed over.” Such is the wisdom that edutainment dispenses time and again, this nugget coming from the time travel episode of Chris Elliott’s insane prime-time experiment “Get a Life.” Mankind and movie producers alike continue to spin cautionary tales of rifts in the time-space continuum. But do their lessons fall on deaf ears? With Mega Time Squad, New Zealand director Tim van Dammen takes a fresh angle on chronological chaos in the form of a lowbrow crime thriller. It doesn’t completely pay off, but the shaggy attempt is endearing, and you might learn something before it’s all done.
Small time dealer John (Anton Tennet) and his friend Gaz (Arlo Gibson) think it’s a good idea to grow nuts and double cross their crime boss Shelton (Jonny Brugh). But these aren’t the smartest thugs on the block. When Shelton orders the buddies rip off a Chinese gang, John and Gaz keep the loot for themselves, but that’s not the end of their troubles. The curious John takes an ancient bracelet that turns out to be a time machine whose owner is doomed to be consumed by a fierce demon.
John seems to outsmart the demon at first by virtue of stupidity. Whenever he’s in danger—from Shelton and his gang, or from the powerful triad now after him—he just pushes a button on the bracelet and goes back in time just far enough to prevent his mishaps from taking place. The problem is that every time he invokes this do-over, he creates a John time-clone, and before long he’s got his own gang of Johns, gleefully named the Mega Time Squad. Yet even with a gang of Johns, there are egos to sort out.
Clocking in at just under 80 minutes (although the official IMDb running time is 86), Mega Time Squad is taut and loaded with energy. As the Johns pile up and bombard the screen with a small army of scrawny white guys in hoodies, the movie becomes a feature-length live action “Beavis and Butthead” combined with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Tennet plays his low budget time traveler with a goofy innocence that makes you like him even as you shake your head at his utter cluelessness.
Unfortunately, the movie’s budget is too low to sell all of its crime thriller aspirations. While surveillance cameras provide a good and cheap way of juggling Johns, other camera angles seem like awkward choices made for lack of money. And if everyone around the Mega Time Squad loses track of which John is which, so does the viewer.
Still, with his minimal resources, van Dammen has beaten Hollywood at its own game. Mega Time Squad doesn’t have the Hollywood imprimatur of the more ambitious Happy Death Day 2U, in which resourceful college students try to repair their own disruptive time loops. But this scrappy New Zealand B-movie is more satisfying.
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