Time Travel Is Dangerous (2024) Review

Time Travel Is Dangerous (2024) Review

The ensemble cast surround best friends and shop owners Ruth Syratt and Megan Stevenson, who play characters based on themselves, bringing their own vibrant personalities and undeniable chemistry to the screen. The film is set around their actual Muswell Hill vintage shop ChaChaCha, bringing a real-life documentary element to the sci-fi mockumentary.

Best friends Ruth and Megan run a vintage shop in Muswell Hill. When they stumble across a time machine, it occurs to them that stock is much cheaper if they ‘borrow’ from the past – well, it’s free. They don’t want to change history, or rob banks, they just want to find a nice Victorian lamp or authentic 80s bum bag without getting sucked into the hellish time-space vortex that is “the Unreason”. The thing is, TIME TRAVEL IS DANGEROUS.

TIME TRAVEL IS DANGEROUS celebrated international premieres at Austin Film Festival, FrightFest Halloween & Trieste Science+Fiction Festival where it has received critical acclaim with Sci-Fi Now calling it “endearing, surreal and funny” and MovieJawn labelling it a “hilarious, exciting, nerve-wracking adventure that made me question my beliefs on what a sci-fi movie is supposed to be.”

TIME TRAVEL IS DANGEROUS is described by the film’s marketing blurb as being ‘a quintessentially British comedy’ and its certainly that! There’s narration from British National Treasure Stephen Fry – with his voiceover reminding of the narrator on the early Eighties TV adaptation of Douglas Adams’ hysterical THE HITCH HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY – and a cast of familiar British faces, including Johnny Vegas and Jane Horrocks.

Director & co-writer Chris Reading set out to make a light-hearted mock-doc and that is exactly what this is, albeit too slight, as the humour raises little more than a smile at best. Its mock-doc stylings feel like a throwback to the early Noughties where improvised humour was at its zenith, whereas nowadays the format feels tired and worn out. TIME TRAVEL IS DANGEROUS takes a good while to find its stride and I was beginning to worry that I was going to be eternally stuck with endless scenes of mind-numbing banter between Ruth Syratt and Megan Stevenson.

However, around the film’s midpoint the ensemble acting and Terry Gilliam-inspired vibe come together and the pacing and interesting levels both pick up. However, this all came a little too late in the day for me and by then I was losing interest in what felt initially padded out by too many, and not always as funny as they might think they are, improvised scenes of two friends buggering around with a time machine.