Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

2:22 Blu-ray Movie Review

Why Not 1:11? Or 3:33? Or 4:44? Or . . .

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 2, 2017

The script for 2:22 floated around Hollywood before landing with an Australian director, Paul Currie, who eventually found financing in his native land. The product of two American screenwriters, 2:22 is set entirely in New York City, and its crucial location is Grand Central Station, to which the action returns over and over again. Currie's challenge was to re-create that iconic Manhattan landmark, as well as Central Park and numerous other New York locations, while shooting almost entirely in Sydney. The result is a triumph of production design and digital effects, but the filmmaking team got so caught up in CGI wizardry that they lost control of the story they were telling. Despite a promising beginning, 2:22 quickly loses momentum and fizzles by the end.

2:22 centers on Dylan Branson (Michiel Huisman, Game of Thrones), an air traffic controller at Kennedy Airport, who is suspended after he freezes on the job, almost causing a collision between one plane landing and another taking off. Dylan says that his "gift" is seeing patterns in the world, and lately he's been seeing them everywhere, especially on his way to work, where he passes through Grand Central and repeatedly observes the same groupings of people in the same locations. Dylan's obsessive logging of patterns expands to include pedestrians, street workers and even star constellations, that last item inspired by memories of Dylan's father and reports of a distant supernova currently visible from Earth. As his apartment fills with scrawls of recorded observations, Dylan is convinced that they contain a hidden meaning. In real life, he'd be labeled a schizophrenic—a possibility briefly floated in the movie—but 2:22 labors mightily to generate suspense from his pursuit, which grows increasingly frantic as he realizes that something dire is occurring every day at exactly 2:22 in the afternoon.

Dylan's only distraction from his patterns is a new romance with Sarah Barton (Teresa Palmer, Lights Out), a curator in an art gallery who is just emerging from an ill-fated romance with one of the gallery's principal artists, Jonas (Sam Reid, Prime Suspect 1973). Dylan and Sarah meet at a dance concert, but neither of them realizes that they're already linked by the chance connection (or is it more than chance?) that Sarah was a passenger on one of the planes that Dylan almost crashed. As their affair blossoms, other connections emerge, until Dylan becomes convinced that events from the past are recurring in the present, placing Sarah in mortal danger.

2:22 relies on an array of coincidences, but too many of them feel like plot contrivances rather than eerie synchronicities. (Dylan's discovery late in the film of thirty-year-old letters stashed in the ceiling of his loft is especially credulity-straining.) Currie and his team of editors work overtime to sell their conception as some sort of mysterious cosmic blueprint, overlaying scenes with star charts, strategically slowing down the action to accentuate patterns that Dylan thinks he sees, and blurring the lines between what Dylan imagines and what actually happens. But they can't decide whether they're telling a ghost story, an X-Files-style sci-fi tale or a thriller about reincarnated lovers like the ill-fated pair in Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again. While that 1991 pulp entertainment was smart enough not to take itself too seriously, 2:22 appears to have grander aspirations—but it's impossible to tell what those aspirations are. By the end, the filmmakers throw up their hands, gloss over practical problems and plot holes, and explain away everything with that hoariest of cliches, "love conquers all".

2:22 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

2:22 was shot by the distinguished Australian-based cinematographer David Eggby (Mad Max). Specific information about the photographic format was not available, but the image appears to have been digitally acquired. Magnolia Home Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray features a sharp, detailed and colorful image that brings all of the filmmaking team's painstaking New York re-creations vividly to life. Even as the narrative falters, there's always something interesting to look at, especially with the wide assortment of cinematic tricks deployed to convey Dylan's increasingly skewed and multi-layered perceptions of the world around him. Except for a few fleeting instances of banding, the image is free of artifacts, aliasing or distortion. Magnolia has mastered 2:22 at an average bitrate of 20.99 Mbps, and the encode appears to be capable.

2:22 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

2:22's 5.1 soundtrack has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, and it's an effective mix, reinforcing the subjective point of view that dominates the film with appropriate surround placements and rising to the film's big events (e.g., the near-miss airline incident) with punch and broad dynamic range. The foreboding score is credited to Lisa Gerrard (Gladiator) and James Orr.

2:22 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Although the cast participates sporadically, the main interviewee throughout the extras is director Paul Currie. All of the featurettes are padded with overlong excerpts from the film.

• Time with the Story and the Characters (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:29).



• Recreating New York and Grand Central (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:07).



• Working with the Director and the Cast (1080p; 1.78:1; 8:40).



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2.35:1; 2:27).



• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment: Trailers for Detour, Synchronicity , Gridlocked and Person to Person, plus promos for the Charity Network and AXS TV.



• BD-Live: I don't know why Magnolia continues to include this feature, because it hasn't provided any BD-Live content for years. This disc is no exception.

2:22 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Magnolia seems to be withdrawing from the Blu-ray market in favor of streaming HD releases; three of the four titles for which this disc includes trailers have already been released and the fourth won't be favored with a Blu-ray version. It's an unfortunate development for a company specializing in films that can't attract the financial backing for wide theatrical distribution. I suspect that 2:22 received Blu-ray treatment because of its elaborate visual effects, and the format certainly showcases those to good advantage. I just wish it was a better movie. Buyer's choice.