Review of Time Runner

Time Runner (1993)
5/10
Mediocre sci-fi with good performance from Hamill
4 May 2008
Warning: Spoilers
Mark Hamill -- a pretty good actor who appeared in a lot of really bad movies and never was able to escape the typecasting of "Luke Skywalker" until he got into voice work. Quite a few of his movies I skipped back in the day, and I don't mind picking one of them up like this one just in hopes that it might end up being fun. This one was a bit better than I might have expected it to be, but nothing too remarkable.

Hamill plays a guy from the future, sent back in time through a wormhole in the midst of an alien invasion to try to stop the invasion from happening. He meets up with scientist Rae Dawn Chong, who turns out to be one of the aliens herself but helps him anyway because apparently the aliens who are actually planning to invade Earth are some kind of renegades of her planet. One of them is the guy who will be the future President of the World. These are really only minor spoilers actually because the movie is so completely predictable. Brion James and Mark Baur hold down the villain roles, with James in particular being very underwhelming with his one note performance. Gordon Tipple plays the strange character Arnie, who's airplane is hijacked by Hamill and Chong but who ends up joining them for the whole rest of the adventure apparently out of sheer boredom with his regular life.

Everything in this movie we've seen before. Who out there is going to be surprised when the villains decide to kill Hamill's character's mother to avoid him being born? Obviously the whole thing is a rip on "Terminator", except that in this case the aliens don't have to travel back in time to hunt Hamill, they're already in 1992 when he gets there. The name of the film and the presence of James in the cast might remind one of "Blade Runner", which would be an extremely unfortunate comparison to make. All of this being said, I didn't find the movie excruciatingly boring. Mark Hamill is a good actor and I think he did good work in the movie, as did Chong, despite the limitations of the script. The effects are surprisingly well done, although nothing really spectacular happens. And it has a nice sort of downbeat ending, plus it avoid the romantic distractions of "Terminator" -- not that they didn't make "Terminator" a better film, but it's just that almost every other imitation I've seen has imitated the romance to much lesser effect so I was glad they didn't attempt that here with Chong and Hamill.

Basically a mediocre film, but it won't be a waste of time for sci-fi fans.
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