Susan Granger’s review of “OUT OF TIME” (Showtime TV)
I’m usually impressed by Showtime’s made-for-television movies but this family-oriented updating of the Rip Van Winkle legend is just dull. The story begins in 1980 in the tiny town of Suttersville, Oregon, where Jack Epson (James McDaniel) is married to Annie (Mel Harris) and they have a ten year-old daughter (Brittany Moldowan). Jack’s a dreamer, a romantic who is lured into the woods by magical spirit guides who have been monitoring the uneasy balance between nature and development for 250 years. As a political activist and deeply caring man, Jack’s been chosen to be their mortal spokesman to save Suttersville from itself. The spirit guides entice him to drink from a mysterious spring so he sleeps for 20 years. When he awakens, he returns to the disturbing, high-tech world of 2000. His family believes he deserted them, and his daughter (Karen H. Holness) has a ten year-old of her own now; it’s this boy (Neil Denis) who helps Jack understand not only what’s befallen him but what he must do to prove his worth. The villain is a real-estate developer (John Novak) who is secretly planning to build a condominium complex on a pristine mountain. Co-written and directed by Ernest Thompson (“On Golden Pond”), it’s filled with stilted, flowery platitudes and sappy, contrived emotions. In a peculiar nod to political correctness, Jack and Annie are a mixed-racial couple, as are the grown daughter and her beau, yet this fact is never acknowledged, as if it presented no conflict to anyone in rural America in 1980 nor in the present. On the Granger Made-for-TV Movie Gauge, “Out of Time” is a slow-paced, forgettable 4 with an admirable, if heavy-handed, environmentalist message about the questionable advances of progress.
