(2002)
2.5
Brian J. Dillard
With his crooked smile and boy-next-door looks, Jesse Bradford stole hearts and sold plenty of pinups after his breakout role as Kirsten Dunst's boyfriend in Bring It On. Unfortunately for the budding heartthrob, his follow-up Clockstoppers is a surpassingly lame attempt at the genial sci-fi-teen comedy formula that helped make Michael J. Fox an '80s movie star. The film's what-if premise is a hoary science fiction cliché, but such humble concepts have spawned success stories from Alien to The Terminator. No, the real problem with Clockstoppers is that it exhausts its central conceit early on, then spends the next hour falling back on action-adventure clichés. The early scenes are equal parts charming and amusing, as Bradford's boy wonder and Paula Garces' plucky exchange student meet cute and explore the possibilities of "hypertime" together. But once they've enjoyed a kiss on the edge of forever and used their clock-stopping abilities to play a few good pranks, they're plunked down into a market-researched, ethnically balanced teen posse whose dialogue runs along the lines of "Zach, man, your watch is off the hook!" By the time French Stewart shows up to work his wacky schtick and set the Escape to Witch Mountain plot in motion, the film's few remaining pleasures include Star Trek in-jokes from director Jonathan Frakes and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance from the under-utilized Julia Sweeney. Bradford manages to keep up appearances throughout, but if he ever makes it out of the teen-movie ghetto, Clockstoppers probably won't get a bullet point on his resumé.
Clockstoppers on AllMovie
Clockstoppers (2002)
