Gosh, I like that Jake Gyllenhall.

I could almost leave this review at that. Gyllenhall carries this movie on his wide but non-threatening shoulders, and carries it very ably indeed. The story is pretty outrageous: a bomb has detonated on a Chicago train carrying sundry civilians, and the consciousness of dead air force pilot Colter Stevens (Gyllenhall) awakens inside one of them eight minutes before the disaster. His mission: to track down the bomber and therefore avert an even bigger calamity. Needless to say, he doesn’t succeed the first time, or this would be a very short movie.

Needless also to say, added into the mix is a romantic subplot in which Stevens meets fellow commuter Christina (Michelle Monaghan), and is instantly deep in crush -- because, hey, it’s Michelle Monaghan -- but then is forced to watch over and over as she is consumed by flame, with little hope of her eventual salvation. (He’s time traveling; she’s already dead. Don’t you hate when that happens?)

On the outside of all of this are the shadowy government figures who head up the Source Code project, a kind of Universal Soldier-esque program that quite inexplicably (seriously, they were never able to sufficiently explain it) is able to harvest the brainwaves or patterns or something of people, either down- or upload them into computers, and then pull the ol’ switcheroo, sending trained personnel into otherwise fraught circumstances in the bodies of those at the scene. Back in time.

So far, so technobabbly. But not to fret; this movie is about so much more than the time travel and the Source Code thingamajig; it’s a thriller and a mystery and a romance as much as it is a science fiction mindfuck along the lines of Inception and the recent (far less enjoyable) The Adjustment Bureau. The burning question we actually come to care about way more than the whole catch-the-bomber scario -- which is a subplot that becomes so insignificant as to not even warrant a proper onscreen denoument -- is what is Stevens doing as a part of this super secret defense force program, and where does Vera Farmiga fit into it all?

Vera Farmiga plays a conflicted military adviser of some sort who acts in the capacity of Stevens’s handler. Aside from being quite believable when spouting a good deal of the exposition we need to get any kind of handle on what the hell is happening, she also shows us the softer side of soldiering, as she struggles with the dictates of her heart and conscience over her orders to Get the Job Done. The movie is undoubtedly Gyllenhall’s, but Farmiga, while not exactly scene-stealing, certainly borrowed her scenes heavily, and is a delightful surprise in what can only be considered a very real departure for her. Let’s hope many more such roles come her way.

But Source Code, at only an hour and a half, doesn’t long dwell on Farmiga, or her fellow government flunky, Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright); Stevens’s incipient love of Christina is dealt with pretty swiftly as well, and much of the movie zips by as though director Duncan Jones was worried that if he slowed down long enough to let us think too much about it, uncomfortable questions centering on things like logic and reason might push themselves inconveniently forward. Or perhaps it’s just that after his glacially-paced debut feature, Moon, he was eager to show that he could do high octane action just as well as quite brilliant but nevertheless mind-numbing introspection.

High octane this movie really is, but in a really unusual and indefinably classy way. Despite an ending that rather devalues most of what came before (there’s all this mystical soul crap that, yeah, okay, whatever dude), it is a taut, beautifully-crafted and exhilarating SF thriller that captivates utterly for almost the whole of its short running time… and, then (if you’re anything like me) will stay with you for far longer, as the inconsistencies and ill-explained details swirl around your head and you are left with a zillion questions, but with one surely universal truth.

Gosh, I like that Jake Gyllenhall.

   -- Rachel Hyland