Hey, all you listeners, welcome back to Movie Mastery. It's the podcast where we watch the movies that you recommend to us. I'm John, and with me is my co-host, Jeff. Hello there. And this time around, we stumbled into the wonderful Nickelodeon blockbuster Clockstoppers. Yeah, have we watched another Nickelodeon movie? I felt like maybe they had a hand in the Sonic movie, but I'm not sure.
I don't believe so. Maybe it's just because I've always... Oh, no. Go ahead. I was trying to think if we had, but then I was like, oh, no, I've just, you know, independently watched, like, Good Burger. Oh, fair enough, fair enough. Yeah, I have... Since I had that giant pile of Ninja Turtle toys or board game that showed up at my house recently, that has Nickelodeon branding all over it, so that's probably just what was getting into my head. Yeah, that's probably it. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a Nickelodeon movie, Clockstoppers, from 2001, and dear God, is it ever. Ah, yes. So, Clockstoppers is a movie about a kid who finds a watch that not...
So much stops time as it speeds you up so that it seems like everything else has stopped. Fundamentally, those two things are identical. Fundamentally. Except one's impossible and the other one is just highly improbable. They're both impossible. I took a bunch of notes on this movie. My first note is obviously the time stop functionality would be 90% of our discussion if we allowed it to be. So, I mean, we'll get into the spoilers in a minute, but I'm just going to say it is very clearly aimed at like a 12-year-old audience type of movie because, you know.
12-year-olds want to see high schoolers. Yeah, I went and talked to my girlfriend a little bit about this, telling her, oh, I have to watch a Nickelodeon teen movie from 2001. And she was like, oh, who's good at skateboarding in it? And I was like, I don't think anyone's good at skateboarding. The main character, mountain bikes. And she's like, yeah, same thing. I was like, yeah, you're right. Here's a real big squeeze out of a surprise for you. His best friend is a black guy who's a DJ.
Yeah, I mean, this movie is very much of its time. Oh, yeah. I mean, I just feel like I've already seen this movie, and I haven't, because it hits so many of the hallmarks of movies aimed at young or pre-teens, like the 12 to 14 range, made by Nickelodeon or Disney in that era. They're all the same movie. You can swap out the characters. It's not difficult. Yeah, I mean, you get what is your weird premise, and then it's all just like your main character is...
good at something that is like, ah, the kids will like a skateboarder or a biker or a surfer or something so he can do cool surfers, skate tricks or whatever. We want him to be identifiable to kids who are like still on their allowances and stuff. So we'll say he made enough money to buy himself a Mustang, but his dad won't let him. He has enough money for the down payment. No, I know. But to me, that was like supposed to be showing that this kid is like a self-starter and a go-getter. And I was like, oh God, please tell me that the arc of this movie isn't, I want a specific car and I have not been granted that car.
So, um, no spoilers. I'm going to go ahead and say no one needs to see this movie. The target audience doesn't need to see this movie. No, moviemaking has progressed beyond this at this point. We are now taking movies like this that are aimed at preteens and squeezing them into 22 minute format. Yeah. I mean that, or we just go ahead and turn them into something like Hunger Games or whatever. If you want something for young adults, you either do that. Yeah. Notably, this movie does not have the modern hallmarks of young adult series. There was no love triangle. The main character was only referenced as being special by his dad once. Yeah. He doesn't have like, ooh, I've got.
This one weird talent that I try to deny, but it makes me the best. Yeah, so this is an older school variety, but you're absolutely right. This is not a movie anyone needs to rush out and see. You didn't miss anything when you clearly didn't see this. All right, let's go ahead, take a quick break, play some music, and we'll be right back with the full spoiler review of Clockstoppers.
All right, we're back, and it's time to dive into the clock that stops. Oh, boy. Yeah, so the biggest name in this movie is probably French Stewart. It's sadly French Stewart because the villain of the film is Michael Bayne or Bean, however you pronounce that. Yeah, I mean, we've got Michael Bayne, and that's great. People know him from Terminator. Yeah, now granted, they have given him the 2001-era Tiny Soul Patch.
Oh, well, he's a villain in a 2001 joint. Obviously, he has a tiny soul patch. He has the John Travolta from Swordfish Soul Patch. Are you a bad guy in its round of the year 2000? Do I have a look for you? Oh, boy, you're just one big pair of mutton chops away from being the bassist in a ska quintet. Yeah, but we start on French Stewart, and he is very heavily bearded and attempting to navigate his way through an airport.
Yeah. Oh, an airport that this was obviously filmed pre-9-11. Oh, right? Where you could just wander around an airport to your heart's content? Where you could just, like, go up to security and be like, hey, I'm going through this. Goodbye. I mean, this might be the last movie. I mean, this came out in 2001. Did it? Because I had it coming out in 2002. Oh, okay. Well, then it was probably filmed in 2001, but damn. That would make it even more likely this is the last movie where they're like, yeah, you can just do whatever you want in an airport.
Yeah, this came out March 2002, so this had to be like, oh man, we finished filming and it was like June 2001. God damn it. There were a bunch of movies that were affected by September 11th. I remember that much. I know the first Spider-Man movie was. Yeah. That there was a shot of a helicopter being suspended between the towers. And I'm pretty sure there were a few other films that had stuff related to the towers or to towers falling down that got ruined. But this one was just like, oh, this guy's just allowed to freely wander his way through airport security, cut lines, yell at people, buy tickets from people on the other side of the gate. It was ridiculous.
I was like, you can't be on the other side of security without a ticket already. What is this? I found it weird because basically he's trying to get on an airplane and he is exceedingly disappointed that the first flight to Costa Rica is fully booked. And he's like, you can put me in the cargo hold. I don't care. And they're like, no, we can't. There's no room on the plane. He's like, oh, great. Well, thanks for killing me. And then he goes off to bribe a guy to give him his ticket. And I was like, why didn't you try bribing the airline person? Well, I mean, if they don't have any tickets to give out. They got something. They got something. Yeah. I mean, if you got big handfuls of hundreds, they'll figure something out. They'll bump someone else. They'll drag an unfortunate guy off the plane.
It's interesting to me that his choice of I'm going to bribe someone for their ticket was just the dad of a family. Well, he picked pretty well because the family was awful. I don't think the dad wanted to get on an airplane with them. There were like 11 people in this family and they were all wearing the same clothes. Yeah, they're all dressed in like tropical shirts. And it was like three children that were all about two years old, just yelling and running. Yeah. And I'm sure they're all in tropical shirts because they're on their way to fun Costa Rica.
But, you know, he buys his way onto the plane, skips the line to get onto the plane because he's a jerk. And right as he steps into the plane, instead, he gets suddenly yanked backwards by mysterious technology that's never explained and is not focal to the movie in any way. No, he gets taken by someone that's in time stop. Oh, right. They're just in time stop when it happens. I get it. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Honestly, I'm surprised that he wasn't in time stop. He had access to the watches.
I mean, that's what I thought was going to be the way that he would get onto the plane anyway, because he would just be like, oh, I'll just stop time and get onto the plane. Right, exactly. And then you could just stay in time stop for the duration of the flight, because apparently it makes you invisible. So you could just sit down in an aisle and be like, whatever, I'm sitting here. Yeah, I'm interested to know, because the whole idea of this time stop watch. Oh, we get this out of the way early? Okay. Yeah. Is that, I mean, you have to know that this is going to be most of what we talked about. You wrote it down. No, well, no, all I wrote down is if we allow ourselves to go off on time travel, it will be the entire episode. I'll allow it.
I have like two more pages of notes beyond that, but sure. The watches vibrate your molecules so fast that you become light speed and other people can't see you because you're moving faster than them relativistically. But you can affect them. The question I have is, if you sit still long enough, are you visible then? No, and we know you aren't because there are scenes in the movie where people will use it to hide or will just stay in one general location. There's another note I have in here that just says, the DJ contest scene, all of it.
Yes. I mean, yes. And there's a scene in that where the two of them are in hyper time just doing whatever they want on stage for a good two or three minutes and no one ever sees them. And they're not moving around that much. No, that was definitely the scene where I was like, I have questions. Yeah, yeah. So the watch basically, it stops, it more or less stops time around you. Now the movie goes ahead, just gleefully disregards the meaning of that. Like, oh no, it's not stopped. It's just super slow. See, look, this bee is still kind of moving when it flies. And if we touch it, we can move it through at our relative speed and then let go of it. And it goes back to just sort of stating where it was.
And then they do things like, oh, this thing, this car is leaving light trails behind it because of its brake lights. You're like, no, that's bullshit. If it's going slow enough that you can still see a bee moving, then light is still a billion times faster. Yeah, that was, again, some issues. There's a lot of issues. There's a lot of things where I'm like, wait, what? There's a part, one of my favorite things in the movie is a part where one of the villains grabs a handful of paper wall in hypertime and throws it, and it gets about a foot away from her and then just stops in the air because it's left, like, I guess the bubble of hypertime influence that she has. Well, I imagined it as, because I also noticed that, that it was, you're moving so fast.
that when you throw it, you're throwing it so fast that it still maintains a lot of momentum. Well, here's the thing. It's got to be bubble-driven, because if it's momentum-driven, then it calls into question a thing that I kept wondering why it wasn't happening in the movie, which is things catching on fire from going light speed and air friction. See, I'm fine with that not happening for some reason. Well, obviously, because the movie couldn't just be about like, wow, I found the ability to go a million miles an hour. Oh, I immediately evaporated because I was sanded to death by air molecules. I mean, part of me is like, oh, it's because each and every individual molecule is going so fast that it's not just that you're getting hit by...
tiny meteors of air molecules, you're just, you're kind of, like, bending around them. I mean, shit, there's a bit at the end where he pulls a, like, the Flash move and starts phasing through stuff. Yeah, I mean, there's an explanation for that, but anyway, it's best to just assume that they get, like you were saying, the power that the Flash has in most movies, which isn't that he's going fast, it's that he stops everything else. And that's how they always... My real question was, if someone were to be like, oh, I, like, punch a guy, like, are you going so fast that when you punch him in your ridiculous time that it is like he just got shot in the chest? Well, I mean, you see them moving people around and it's like...
Okay, there's a point where they're their friend who's doing something, and they push his head to put him in a cooler pose, and you're like, you just definitely snapped that guy's neck. Because he wasn't expected to be pushed at several thousand miles an hour to a slightly different angle. Yeah, no, the... The whole thing. God, it just begs so many questions. Basically, you have to be like, look, it's magic. The French steward invented a magic watch that does sorcery. And then it's OK. It's OK. He found a technological way to tap into the speed force and it hand waves everything. It's all hand waves all the time. Anyway, he gets yanked. Hyper time makes you invisible. And there are thugs who have access to hyper time. So he gets grabbed by thugs who drag him all the way back to the airport and throw him into a van. And then they're going to make him work on weaponizing or mass producing the hyper time with the problems.
in its design solved. Because right now, you can't use it without your relative time going at the speed you're going. So, you get old real fast. Yeah, and French Stewart in this is supposed to be, you know, kind of a young hippie kind of guy. He's like a college sophomore. Yeah, he's supposed to be, well, he was a college sophomore because he was a student. He is a doctor now. Oh, okay, right. But I'm saying he's probably like in his early 20s. But in this, they've got him in a whole bunch of like gray makeup and whatnot to make him look older. Right, yeah. He's been aged by extended use of hypertime technology. Yeah, and...
That's one of the things they need him for, is they're like, oh, we don't just need you for the hypertime thing, but we also have some device you are working on that will reverse the effects of the sped-up aging of this. Right, and that comes down in our first kind of villain confrontation scene, which is where Michael Biehn is acting as sort of like this dude who works for something called QT Technologies, who is dealing with what I think is Black Ops military guy, but it's Dr. Kelso from Scrubs. Yeah, Dr. Kelso is an NSA agent. Who's like, I want this technology, and I'm giving you three days to develop it, and if you don't, then we're going to take it. And I'm like, how does that, that's it.
No, it's, hey, we're going to come get it in three days because you're not allowed to make it anymore. Oh, is that what it is? I thought it was that he wanted it for the NSA and he was like, okay, so he was literally giving it. But then why give them even three days if he's like, I want you guys to stop building illegal technology and I'll come by in three days to be sure. I'm like, no, do it now. I mean, you're cops then. Well, no, the whole thing was this place was building it for the NSA and the government. Like it was a government contract to make these things. Okay. And then he was like, oh, the oversight committee or whatever is shutting it down because.
they don't want it to fall into the wrong hands. Like, if one of the Saddam's of the world were to get their hands on this, someone could just, you know, speed into the president's bathtub and drop a nuke and we'd never be able to stop him. I'm like, yeah, but... True, you'd have guards in hypertime. I was gonna say, well, honestly, I can't imagine that the fact that you could do this to someone else...
would then not just make every single, like, NSA, CIA, FBI agent just cream themselves. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the idea, I mean, I appreciate that I guess Kelso's character in this is supposed to be a principled man. He kind of just feels like the villain above the villain, but if he's a man of principle, he's like, look, I don't want the world to move to this next level of Cold War, where we have to be worried about light speed guys. Yeah, he's like, we just, we cannot have this get out there, because the second we do...
Like, if we start using it and someone else manages to develop it, everything is going to go to shit. So we're just going to shut this down right now. But by right now, I mean in three days. Well, yeah, because he was just coming by to deliver the message of like, hey, I just got word that we're shutting the project down. Get all of your notes and everything together. We'll be by in three days to take it all. OK, well, now we've met French Stewart, who's going to be forced to be a scientist. And we've met Kelso and Michael Bean, who are going to be kind of the villain and the dude who is threatening the villain. Now it's time to finally meet our hero, a kid named Zach, who is good at mountain biking.
For the beginning of this movie, Zach's just a real goobery piece of shit. I mean, he mostly is all the way through it. First of all, this guy, his name's like Jesse Bradford is the actor or something. But I was like, wait, is this an early work of Nicholas Brendan that I hadn't heard of before? Because to me, he looked exactly like Xander. I mean, there's definitely some similarities there. It could just be goofus white guy. That could just be, I've got goofy white guy blindness or something. But in any event, like, yeah, he's good at mountain biking, though, because we open on him just doing, you know, sit there style mountain bike traversal tricks where he's just...
sitting on his bike weird and kind of bouncing in place and waiting between two cars. Yeah, there's a point where he is, he's biking to go see his friend who works at a paintball store. And, you know, he kind of does some tricks and stuff while he's going along. You know, he's changing the position on the bike during a red light and he's jumping over some stuff. But there is just a small section right before he hits the store where he just sort of starts bouncing the bike in the middle of the street for no reason. Yeah, he does that a lot in this movie. What are you...
doing well it's just is that something that like mountain bike people do it's something they're just like i'm driving on the street i mean yes it is because that's a stunt thing if you go to youtube and look up like stunt bikes you'll see people doing all kinds of goofy tricks on their mountain bikes uh normally it's like bmx guys but there are mountain bike guys who do it too this also is the point in the movie where uh they press play on now that's what i call music 2002 and then just never turn it off We get all the greatest hits of 2002. We got Blink-182, Fuel, you got Smash Mouth, you got Blink-182 again, you got some more Blink-182. Yeah, it was a little Blink-heavy. It was just like, take off your pants and jacket, the whole album.
They're like, well, we got the rights to one of the songs. We may as well just get the whole thing. Do we get a discount if we also get What's My Age Again? Yes, you do. You do get that. Okay, great. Put that in there, too. Good, good, great. Thank you. Perfect. That's what I want here. Can I also get one for my little windmill? Yeah, yeah, of course. Obviously, 15% off for each additional one that you add. Yeah, so he heads to his buddy, stops by a car dealership to look at a Mustang because that's his object of desire through the film, a convertible Mustang, and then goes to a paypal store where his buddy, Meeker, is hanging out at the paypal store working.
Yep, and that's also where we will find our love interest for the movie, the foreign exchange student Francesca, who you may recognize as the foreign love interest object of desire from Harold and Kumar. Yeah, yeah. I also did want to mention that we opened on the character, the Zack guy, buying a $1 typewriter from a junk store and then selling it on eBay for $35. That's how he's been making money, is taking junk store fines and upselling them because he knows about the internet. Yeah.
He's like, oh, I'll take this. And then instead of saying it's a typewriter, I'll say it's a non-crashable word processor. Well, first of all, typewriters break all the fucking time. Second of all, why didn't you just put vintage in front of it and then raise the price to $35? There are people out there who are nuts for that kind of shit. Just absolutely nuts. Just bananas. Just dick hard all the time about old typewriters. Just nuts and bananas. Okay, yeah. So he sees a sexy girl in the room and he's like, oh, shoot, I have to go hit on her because she's a foreign exchange student. So she's probably lonely and confused. And I was like, ew. Don't.
Don't. No, no. I already didn't like you because your big dilemma in this movie is that your dad won't get you the specific car you want. But now this too. It turns out he's read some special hitting on women's secrets in this month's Cosmo. Indeed. And he gets shut down and told to go fuck himself because she has also read that article in Cosmo. And also because his approach was very specific. He was just like, hey, you seem like you're new around here. Can I show you around town? And she's like, oh, for God's sake. I mean, the fact that she is currently doing like a wall climb thing while he's like, hey.
You got the time? She's like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Jesus Christ, dude, leave me be. So he does indeed leave her be. He has been, in the parlance of the time, faced. This has been faced. Oh, and we also set up some additional business, that Meeker is about to be a participant in a DJ contest, and he is really counting on his best bud, Zach, to be there to support him in the audience. Yes, indeed. Oh, I really wish that had been the climax of the movie instead of just sort of a thing that happened 20 minutes in. The thing I have with the, I mean, I don't even give a shit, because honestly, I'll just talk about whatever out of order, I don't care anymore. Jump around.
Jump up, jump up and get down. The fucking DJ scene. Are we going there? Are we doing the DJ scene? We don't have to do the whole thing. Oh, no, it's definitely the most important thing in the entire movie. It's the thing I really want to talk about. I mean, I just want to talk about real quick how he's like, yeah, I've been, you know, practicing. I'm going to go up in front of all these people in a super big contest and I'm going to do all my DJ skills. And when he gets up there, he is trash garbage. He is just completely terrible at it. And he's like.
Looking around and you're supposed to get the idea that he's like, I'm not a good DJ because my friends didn't show up to support me. I'm all alone. So I'm bad at this. But his friends are there in the audience. I guess he just didn't spot them. The other thing is, he sees them. There's a point in the movie where he looks around and then the camera like cuts to them and then back to him, essentially giving you the film shorthand of he sees them. Yeah. And then he gets on stage and sucks ass. It's completely terrible. There's a scene prior to this where all these kids are like freshmen in college or something. And they're all right. When they're arriving in class, they get threatened by the local bullies.
like a tall surfer looking dude, and then the main bully, who everybody in this movie has at least a foot and a half on. He's a little tiny fella, and his biggest bully move is soda spraying. But anyway, he is also going to participate in the DJ contest, and he's the mean guy. But here's the other thing, he's also a practiced, accomplished DJ. Yeah, the problem with this scene of like, yeah, we're gonna make it so that this mean guy gets nothing, but your friend is garbage, and this guy is, you know, kind of a jerk, but...
He's very talented, and you're just basically sabotaging him. Yeah, that's exactly what happens. This other kid gets up to compete, and he doesn't do anything rude on the stage. He doesn't call out Meeker. He doesn't go over there and fuck with his equipment or anything. He just does an incredibly good scratch set all by himself. And then it cuts to Meeker, who's just like, and I've never even touched a turntable, and here we go.
And everyone's laughing at him. And so our heroes, because at this point Francesca has come around and now the two of them are hanging out together and they know about the super watch that Zach obviously gets his hands on a copy of, stop time to go fuck with the DJ contest. And they do this not by helping Meeker DJ better, but by making him do a fun dance. Yeah, I was like, okay, I get sort of the idea of like, well, he's so awful at this and it's not like we can DJ for him in time stop. So I guess we'll try and make him look like he's doing some rad dance moves, except it's not a dance contest.
Yeah, I'm like, who cares? If you go out and do literally the best dancing anyone has ever seen, they'll be like, dude, you should definitely join like a b-boy group. That was amazing. Also, you definitely lose because you didn't do what the contest is. No, it's not enough that they make him look like a cool dancer by just picking him up against his will and sort of flailing him around on stage so that he does like the worm and some sort of butt shake and a bunch of popping and locking tight dance moves. But they also go over to the bully kid and make him do a dumb dance. Yeah, they're like, ooh, we're going to have him do like a rump.
shake and then he'll look like he's doing ballet. He'll put his arms in an L shape and jump up and down a little and there's nothing anyone can do about it. It's like, what are you? This is completely on this, I guess, because he looks so nerdy doing a wrong dance that people are going to rescind his title as good at spinning. It's so weird. Especially the problem I'm having is.
In order for him to do these dance moves, you would have to be moving him so slowly relative to you. Because you'd have to be like, all right, the people need to actually see him doing these dance moves instead of just, you know, jerkily having his body ripped apart at light speed. So you'd have to just kind of be like, eh. slight move and slight move and slight move and just do that for like hours on end. That was the thing that got me. I was like, oh, I guess they have all day to dedicate to this because if you think about the relative time difference, like they're going near the speed of light while they're doing this, they were up there for days moving this guy around in their own time frame. Just very slowly moving this guy back and forth to make him look like he's doing a cool dance. They got like four days older. They had to take breaks. They probably went to bed at several points. No, the whole thing, I'm like, all right, we establish.
When we first get sort of the rules of time stop where he looks at the bee and he's like, oh, things are still kind of moving because you can see this bee's wing is still sort of going up and down and flapping. But the time it takes for the bee's wing to say, go fully up and down once. Just one flap of the wing is like 30 seconds. And they're doing an entire like five minute dance routine. And then in the middle of the dance routine, they make him do a handstand on the DJ board so he can continue to scratch his records. And he is still terrible. And at this point, no one cares. They're still cheering for him. They're like, yay, this guy's doing handstand DJ stuff. I mean, granted, he's doing a spin on his head on the record. Now, granted, it sounds awful, but he's going to win anyway because our main character thinks he should. Yeah, it's, uh, I mean, actually, you know what?
We don't know that he wins, because honestly, directly after that, we just smash cut to the three of them in a car, and he's like, wow, you have a watch that stops time. Neat. Like, he's just on board. There's no discussion of what happened. Yeah, we skipped over a bunch of stuff, so just to bring us up, I'm going to recap it at light speed. He's got tension with his dad, who is a college professor, because obviously his dad has more time for his students than for him. His dad's about to go off to a special science convention, but he's recently received a watch in the mail from an old friend. He loses the watch, and then it's found by Zach, and now he has a watch that can stop time. Meanwhile, the bad guys have been forcing...
Fred Stewart to work on trying to solve the time dilation aging problem, and Stewart reveals that he has mailed a watch to his old college professor so that he can help him solve the problem. So now the goons are going to head to this small town to capture the professor or at least get the watch back. Also, Francesca knows about the watch because the two of them agreed to go on a date, and he used the watch accidentally and then brought her a possum, which she refers to as a mouse throughout the entire movie. Yeah, well, you know. The other thing, she's supposed to be Venezuelan in this movie.
Maybe she actually is. But the way that they use her accent in the movie is to have her call him Mr. Meester something and something every time she referred her boyfriend by the end of the movie, Zach. And she's still calling him, listen up here, Mr. Second Chance Man. She calls him Mr. Second Chance Man 11 times. Yes. Now, the actress is Colombian. Okay. But good God. Yeah.
It's definitely a choice. Oh, by the way, French Stewart's character is Dr. Doppler. So, you know, Doppler. Obviously. And of course, he is a student of the dad. The two of them clash over whether or not it would be okay for Zach to have a Mustang. His dad's not against the Mustang. He just wants his son to do more safety research. The son wants the Mustang now. It's very weird to me because sort of neither of them have a good position to be at. Because, you know, one, the dad is like, oh, well, you can't just want something that you want. You've got to show me research and compare it to a bunch of other cars that you don't want. And then.
do all this homework about it. And that's kind of stupid. But then also, it's a little unreasonable for Zack to be like, I scraped together just enough money for a down payment. Please put your signature on the line for me to continue to pay this off. Right. I mean, I get it. Obviously, the kid's supposed to be like 17 or 18. He wants a car and he's going to do what he can to get it. The problem is that this movie sets up this kind of...
competition or conflict between the two of them where the dad's like, look, I really, you've got a spark of creativity and genius in you. I need you to just slow down and do your research. And then there's a point in the movie where he says something and French Stewart's like, you sound just like your dad right now. And then, no, he doesn't. And also, he never learns shit. He just keeps trying random nonsense until anything works. So, I mean, there's one point in the movie where he's like, oh, we need to look at all of our options and weigh things. Yeah. And that's it. That's the one time where he sounds like his dad. And he still doesn't look at all of his options and weigh things. He just tries the first dumb thing he thinks of. Yeah, he's like, hey, what's this? Great. That's an event. We're using it.
Remember when I said weigh all the options? No, fuck it. I like this one. I weigh the first one. Anyway, he gets... Seems pretty good. He goes on this trip with Francesca to see the DJ contest. Everything counts as a date. She gives him a kiss goodbye at the end of it. He's riding home in hyper time just because he thinks it's cool. And that's when he sees lights moving around in his house. He's like, oh shit, other people have hyper time. And then a big chase ensues where he's being chased by thugs. There's a point where he throws a baseball bat at one of these two thugs that are going to pursue him throughout the movie. And she catches it and she doesn't chase him or anything. She does about a minute of baseball bat kung fu kata instead.
Well, yeah, because she's Asian. Yeah. So obviously she has to do kung fu stuff now. Not efficacious kung fu stuff, just, oh, cool bat. I will just spin that around a bunch of times. I'll weigh it, spin it around some more, lift one of my legs so I'm in a crane pose, spin the bat around a little bit. Oh, he ran out of the room. Anyway, I'm going to spin the bat a little bit. Yeah, no, this is definitely one of those like, oh, we're trying to establish that, you know, the big bad guys goons are actually dangerous, but mostly it was just like, hey, why are you, what are you doing with the bat here? What's your plan?
This is also when they call the report that they lost him because they chase him around a little bit and he gets rescued by Fred Stewart, who has also escaped the science facility. And we also have to note that this is where we find out that the bad guy's anti-hypertime weapon is liquid nitrogen. Oh yeah, they spray liquid nitrogen at each other because if you get cooled down, your molecules slow down enough to drop you out of hypertime really fast. Yeah, so it's the only way... to get someone out of hypertime back to real time without them using the watch. This is a projectile thing. They basically use sprayers to shoot steamy blasts of frozen nitrogen. The problem, of course, is the problem we establish when that same villain who does the baseball bat, Kata, also throws some paper, which is that it freezes in place about a foot away from her. So you know that when they're shooting this liquid nitrogen, it should go out about a foot and then just accumulate in the air right there. Yeah. I'm like, you know, I don't care how super compressed you've got this and at what speed you're shooting it out. It's definitely not going to...
work the way you think it is well notably if the paper had just fallen to the ground right away or something like oh yeah you throw the paper and the paper was part of your sphere of influence so it traveled at thousands of miles an hour and settled at thousands of miles an hour but it froze instantly in midair and i think that effect shot kind of doomed the movie because you were like oh there's a bubble they have a bubble of influence that's how come they're not breaking anyone's necks when they like there's a scene where him and francesca go out to or the main character francesca go to a town square to just mess around with hyper time and when you know it it turns out they hate everyone in this town Our hero and his girlfriend just hate everybody. They fuck with a person driving a car, they fuck with a meter maid, there's random bullies in town, and they just violently attack all of them using dangerous hyper-time. It's not the established bullies. I was like, how are you gonna put two bullies in this that aren't already the bullies that we know and are supposed to dislike? Yeah, it'd be like if there was an episode of Power Rangers where they got threatened by Bulk and Skull in the beginning, and then in the middle they were like, oh no, it's Gulk and Dull. Dukat.
But they just mess with, like, it's hilarious because they're just like, wait a minute, I hate that guy and that guy and that guy and that guy and that guy. I was like, wow, maybe you guys are the assholes. Oh, yeah. If you've got grudges with everyone in town. Well, like, they go, oh, this guy's spray painting on a wall. We should teach him a lesson. I'm like, who cares? You basically made it so that this dude's spray paint can exploded into his face. Oh, and then because he couldn't see, he dashed out in front of a car that was out of control because you popped the hood on it while it was driving. Yeah, you very easily could have murdered one to three people with this dumb shit for...
No reason. Yeah, but they're the main character, so... God damn it. Yeah. Anyway, at this point in the movie, no one's hurting the family. The dad's out of town. He's already been kidnapped by the thug, so we don't know that yet. Obviously, our character has a full family. His mom is Julia Sweeney, who you never get used to seeing her out of hat makeup. And then, obviously, because it's a Nickelodeon TV show about a teenager, he's got an antagonistic little sister who doesn't do anything but be antagonistic. Yes.
She will not get off the phone. Oh my goodness. Yeah, and she's just mean to her older brother and happily points out that fact that she's like, we have an antagonistic relationship. I'm your irritating little sister. In about four years, they'll spin me off into my own show. It'll be one of the greatest animes of all time. They'll call it Cory in the house. Now, the thugs chase after Zack and Doppler, and they all are doing hyper-time car stuff. Yeah, it's a hyper-time car race.
This is where the bubble thing really comes into focus, because while you're watching this, Zach, like, has his watch. He's in hypertime. He gets into a car. French Stewart is there, apparently also in hypertime. But then they have to, like, jumpstart the car. And then the car goes at hypertime speed, even though they didn't start it at hypertime.
Yeah, apparently if you're in a car, the car is also in hypertime. But if you go out of hypertime and your car is touching another car, then all of you go out. Now this is going to bring a point that I was thinking about because the whole climax of this movie, and I don't give a shit, is that essentially he uses the watch when they're already in hypertime to go double hypertime. Yeah, he goes into hyper hypertime. Now, presumably... Imagine four hypertimes on the end of a cliff. Presumably, these thugs have these watches.
And they are set to, you know, put you to hypertime and then take you back out. Now, if the car bumped them and brought them back out of hypertime, if the watch then went, oh, you know, you set this for three hours and your three hours are up coming out of hypertime, but you were already out, would it then slow you down? Ooh, interesting question. I mean, you just freeze in place. I mean, relative to the world. Yeah, but would you be able to use that as like a suspended animation technology?
I mean, I guess. As long as we're talking about the climax of the movie here, French Stewart uses de-aging technology on himself to turn himself back to being like 16 years old at the end of this movie. He invents immortality and they don't even mention it. Oh yeah, no. This movie has essentially time-stopping, phasing, invisibility, and eventually immortality slash the fountain of youth. And everyone's just like, ha ha ha, oh you. You get the Mustang you always wanted and the pretty girl will kiss you. Also, you can still stop time. None of this is going to, I don't know.
get the attention of anyone. We're just gonna go ahead and have this. I want to know about this universe. I want to know about this universe after the movie ends where the NSA confiscated like a dozen of these watches because you know that they didn't go, oh, we actually shut the program down. They mostly just wanted to get all the notes so that no one else could reproduce it. Yeah, they do pointedly show the NSA guys walking off screen with a big box full of all the watches. Yeah, it's not like they show them pointedly destroying all the watches. I also like the movie's climax hinges on Zack having a fake watch that while he's riding an elevator up.
to the floor where his father's being held prisoner, he takes the watch off and puts on a different watch that doesn't have the technology in it and hides the original watch in his pocket. He has no reason to do this. It just thankfully turns out to be useful, but all of his other plans turn out to be known about and he's caught in a trap. Well, I mean, it does make sense as far as like, all right, I'll put this on because I already know that every single hypertime goon in this facility is after me. So in case they do catch me...
I may as well have a fake watch on. Honestly, given that the scene before this, the part where he raids the facility where his dad's being held hostage, is him building technology with French Stewart's character, Dr. Doppler. I'm surprised he didn't just be like, look, rebuild my watch, but don't put it in a watch. That way they'll never find it. Put it in something else. Make it my phone or something. So I can still stop time and everything, and it won't get confiscated when they search me. Just put it in this butt plug so that I can hide it without them knowing. Okay, yeah, I mean, there's a billion different little plot points that happen throughout this movie. After the DJ contest, the bullies are completely gone. They're not big enough of a deal to keep...
or being a part of the movie. The father gets kidnapped because he's the other person who could potentially solve the problem. So when Dr. Doppler escapes, they kidnap someone else to just force him to work on it. And oh boy, that pisses off Zach. So he wants to go rescue his dad. And they invent paintballs that shoot liquid nitrogen.
Yep, which is the exact kind of level of Nickelodeon early 2000s bullshit, I would assume. Oh yeah, so you can see a character on a mountain bike with a bunch of paintball guns all over him, and there's a Smash Mouth song playing, and you're like, yeah, this is perfect, this is what I was hoping for. This is the platonic ideal of 2002. The one thing that's missing is a character in the background who's your best friend, but he's got big dreadlocks, and he's calling your girlfriend a hottie. Oh, it has that? Okay, perfect, thanks. That's the kind of dedication to perfection and on-brand directing I would expect from the director of this movie, Jonathan Frakes. Yep, goddammit, Frakes. You know, I have a question for you.
Do you believe in the power of a curse? I have a question for you too, John. What is wrong with you? Tracy! Yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah, Francesca and Zach raid the compound with their HyperTime watches and paintball guns that shoot liquid nitrogen. I know it's nitrous oxide because there's a point when French Stewart is loading their guns, and he's like, there you go, NO2 on the go, or N2O or whatever it is, on the go. And I was like, wait a minute, you've been using a gas dispenser to blast nitrous all over the room you guys are all in? How come you're not, like, passed out or giggling or nothing? Oh, because they're in HyperTime. Ah, of course. It takes a lot longer. Well, no, but he's the one spraying it. That means the nitrous is in his bubble. Yeah. They should be high. As soon as...
As soon as it leaves him and he's no longer spraying it, then it just sort of stops? No, we know for a fact that nitrous oxide can blast eight feet away from you and still be in your hypertime bubble. Yeah, but only if you're blasting it. If I'm blasting it, it can reach eight feet away from me. I also like that the villains apparently ran into the problem of hypertime ammunition not working especially well because, you know, as soon as it leaves your bubble, it's not going to go hyperspeed anymore. So they invented basically what looked like...
bee hive sprayers that shoot liquid nitrogen so they can kind of, you know, flamethrow people. Yeah, I guess if it's still connected in some way, so like the stream is still in your bubble, so it's still going. So good on the villains for figuring out a way to weaponize anything in this weird hypertime scenario. But of course, the heroes just put the same technology into paintball guns, which don't work like that at all. And it just works just fine because they're kids and they're heroes. Yeah, they can shoot a paintball and it's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Quit asking questions. Don't worry about it. In the end, he gets his Mustang. Because you see, we hyper accelerated all of the molecules in...
And the paintball gun as well, so when it shoots, it's actually shooting in hyper time. Every paintball is wearing a little watch. Tiny little watch on every ball. Yeah. Just like me. A tiny little watch on every ball. Anyway, the climax of the movie is pretty much what you'd expect. They get locked into a room where the heroes and the hero's dad are locked in a room where they're just being defended while Michael Bane tries to fight off the NSA for a little bit. But that's not good enough for our hero who uses his watch while he's already in hyper time to go into hyper hyper time. That makes him able to phase into the speed force. He's finally figured out how to phase his molecules and he's become Barry Allen. Yeah, he's the Flash. Yeah. Which is Barry Allen. Now, he is in a super dangerous accelerated state where it hurts him to touch things and he kind of like...
is exuding light everywhere, and it looks like he's about to fall out of reality. So naturally, the thing he needs to do is hold still while his girlfriend comes over and rubs his face. Yeah, there's a point in this where he's like, oh, my hand can go right through this table. I've basically gone out of phase with reality. And he has to, like, stay real still so Francesca can take his hand. I'm like, what are you doing, man? Why did you decide to go incredibly fast so you could stand there? Your molecules are on the verge of just exploding out at the speed of light. What are you doing? Yeah, oh my god. Just fucking do your shit. Yeah, so...
That works. They set up a trap where they blow up a bunch of hydrogen that's being stored in the facility. It's funny because there's a huge thing full of hydrogen in the middle of the room they're in. And Zach's just like, what's this? Oh, that's a big tank of hydrogen. They were making me do experiments on hydrogen. And he's like, hydrogen's explosive. That's perfect. And then they blow up the facility. And Kelso, hilariously, Kelso's in two scenes in this movie. He is not in the dédouement. He shows up in that beginning meeting and then again on video phone to be like, we're coming in and taking everything right now. And then he does not come in. Instead, he just stands outside while everyone else does this. Yeah. Whereas...
The end of this movie, I mean, not the end, but the end of this, when they're still in the facility and all the NSA guys are in there, it's weird to me that none of them were like, hey, you're going to have to come with us. Yeah, right? Like, even if you didn't do anything wrong, which you actually very much did, but even if you were completely innocent in this, you know about hypertime technology, and we've got... some threats we'd like to make. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's one of those things where you're like, wait a minute, I may not like the cops especially, but that's still some due process law-breaking shit they've definitely been doing for a long time. I mean, just for fun, they nearly killed a kid with an exploding spray paint can and attached another kid's nose ring to the spoke of a bicycle. Still don't know how they did that. I mean, I assume they took the nose ring off, put his head next to a bike, and then put the nose ring back on around it. That's a serious violation of someone's personal space. Well, yes, but they don't care. No, they're the hero, so it's okay. They did a good thing. And in the end, he gets a Mustang, and Trent Stewart uses it.
de-aging chair to turn himself into a young person again, who our hero's sister immediately has a crush on. Yeah, yeah, that was, uh... That's creepy. When you think about that character. It was super creepy. I mean, given that that character, no matter how much he's de-aged himself, is mentally 26. Yeah, I don't care what age he looks like. At that point, they still use French Stewart's voice on some 16-year-old's body when he's there. Yeah. But, you know, the little sister's like, hey, who's the hottie? And they don't immediately go, that's a 26-year-old. No, it's cool. It's the soul of a 26-year-old dragon in a child's body.
That makes it okay. It's okay. French Stewart is actually thousands of years old. He just looks like a 14-year-old, but it's fine. Oh, my God. I also just remembered my least favorite thing. Oh, you know what? That's probably a good topic for the end of the thing, so never mind. I was going to say, if you want to save that, sure. I mean, I don't have anything else I particularly need to say about this movie. So, sure, let's move on to our best and worst in the film. Jeff, what was the best thing in this movie for you? I mean, despite the fact that it was aggressively stupid, I'm going to have to say the DJ contest because it was just so wild and ridiculous.
That it was my favorite part. What? How is he not dead? Why is he winning the contest for being a good dancer? What is happening? Good. Also, there's a point where you can spot Jonathan Frakes in a crowd in this movie. And that was my other favorite part. Yeah, he was a janitor at one point. Yeah. Well, there you go. What about you, John? What was your favorite thing? Oh, I'm going to say probably my favorite thing in this movie is it resisted the urge to be overly creepy in that there is a point where Zach is with Francesca and he stops time. Oh, he gets real close to her. He gets real close. He's like, oh, you have really nice skin.
And I thought, oh, God, he's going to kiss her with time, stop, don't, oh, fucking don't do it. And he doesn't. And I was like, thank you, Jesus, God. Also, that scene, he goes, wow, you have really nice skin. And then he looks at the camera as if he's like, hey, Nellis, I know you know what I'm thinking. Skin, right? That's what all guys want. Speaking of the weird treatment of Francesca as a sex object in this movie, there's a part where she's having dinner with her family, and Zach has to sneak into her room because he needs her help with something, but she's having dinner with her huge Venezuelan consulate family. And in the middle of dinner, she gets up, goes to her room, and starts taking her shirt off.
Well, I assumed this was after the meal was over. Had to be after the meal was over. She was like, well, I guess I'll just get into my bra. Oh, never mind. I see the note. Yeah. I mean, just weird. Yeah. Just a weird thing. Just a weird thing. But yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say the fact that the movie didn't make Zach even more of sort of a rapey creep. I think the other thing is my favorite thing. The other thing I kind of like about this being a kid's movie from 2001 is that it is not setting up an obvious sequel or like trying to turn this into a franchise or anything like that. No, it's just out. It's a one and done.
All right, so what is, like you were about to say, your least favorite thing in this movie? Oh, now it feels like it's all built up, and my least favorite thing about this is just that there's an Uncle Cracker cover of Time After Time in this movie. I mean, come on, there was already a Boyz II Men cover of Time After Time that was amazing, that you could have easily used. But no, it's an Uncle Cracker cover of Time After Time. And it plays what's supposed to be a super romantic moment. And the whole time I was just being like, oh, Jesus. Uncle Cracker. Covering a good song badly. Why? I mean, I guess I could also say all the time travel shenanigans. It just infuriated me to no end. But the thing is, this movie was so light and frothy and Nickelodeon-y that I just didn't give that much of a shit. So to me, I think the lasting legacy of the things that are bad about this movie is largely in the soundtrack. And so I think I'm picking pretty correctly here.
Anything that gave Uncle Cracker and Phoenix TX some money. Money should be separated from those people. So yeah, that's my least favorite. What about you? Oh, I'm definitely going to say my least favorite thing was the time stop rampage in the middle of town that they go on. Oh yeah, where they're just cruel to a bunch of people. Like one guy, they nearly kill him because he's test driving the car that Zach would like to buy. Yeah. He's like, he's never wronged them in the past. He's just test driving the car. They have just the flimsiest excuses for basically everyone. They're like, oh, this meter maid, she is known to hand out tickets even before the meter is up. We're going to fuck with her. This person is spray painting a wall. That doesn't affect me at all, but fuck him, right?
This guy's test driving a car. I like that car. Fuck him. I'm going to maybe murder him and also destroy this car that I want. And not only that, not only am I going to put him in an accident, but he's going to nearly hit the spray paint kid. It is not only terrible in that you're like, oh, wow, like I kind of didn't like you because you were just sort of a shitty 2000s goober white guy. But now now you're you're like actively an asshole. But also when they see the aftermath of that, they're like, ha ha ha ha. Yes.
Yeah. I approve. Justice has been served or whatever. And yeah, I look down upon my works and smile. Yeah. If I accidentally cause all that shit, I'd be cringing myself to death. I'd be like, oh yeah, I'm not, I'm going to have a hard time doing anything for the rest of my life without thinking about how bad I fucked that up.
So yeah, that's going to be the worst thing for me. Yeah. All right. There you go. Let's go ahead and rate the movie. We're each going to give it a rating from zero to five, which will give us a total out of 10. Jeff. I would say that this thing is completely inconsequential and throw it like a two for not being exceedingly awful. But the thing is, I know I'm harping on this, but the soundtrack of this thing is so relentless that I had a hard time just sort of losing myself and letting the movie play. So I'm going to give it a one and a half. All right.
That's where I'm coming down. I got so sick of hearing Sugar Ray and Simple Plan and Newfound Glory that I was like, okay, I remember 2002 as well as anyone else does. Please stop. Yeah, I think I'm going to give it a two. Okay. It's basically inoffensive. It's not good, but it's not the worst. I mean, I feel like I have a low baseline that I'm willing to give these Nickelodeon kid movies that maybe I'm just not the right person to review them. I don't know. I mean, you're not the target audience. No, I sure am not.
And I guarantee you I'm one of the two people in the world who bought this movie or rented this movie on Amazon Prime in the past two days. You're damn right you are. Oh, my Amazon Prime watch list is a cry for help. All right. There you go. There was another note. I really wanted to mention it just because it's one of my favorite things you see in movies like this is Michael Bane has an entire like Uber secret mega laboratory full of horrible technology and everything's done in silver and tin foil and there's wires and conduits everywhere and energy and so on. And the central core computer of all of this shit is a 2001 iMac laptop in the candy blue.
Yes. And you know the computer I'm talking about, that one that looks like a toy, that looks like it ought to just do cow sounds when you press any button. Yes. Yeah, that's the core computer of this complex. Just putting that out there. All done. I'm all set. Thank you. Thank you. Anyway, that means three and a half out of ten. It's not great. Don't see it. You don't need to. There's no reason. There was no reason we needed to either, and here we are. And yet...
We did. So thank you so much. If you like what we do, of course, you can always go to patreon.com slash system mastery and support us. And I have a special sweet finally here announcement. Oh, baby. Baby, we got some bonus content. You got a special baby announcement. We got a special baby and its name is bonus content. OK, what you got for me? We are starting a new bit of bonus content here. We are going to be reviewing to start with the first season of Smallville episode by episode. And.
We'll be doing that until we finish the season. We might continue on. Maybe we'll jump over to some other dumb garbage. But we're going to be reviewing some old, probably rose-colored glasses for a lot of people's shitty television. We're going to keep it loose and easy. We aren't going to make any promises about doing all 10 seasons of that show. But the thing is, it's at the $5 level. So if you're already a subscriber at the $5 level, it's just more dollar value for you. Yeah, we're just putting out some more stuff at the $5 level. We've got even more incentive for people to go on there. And it lets us do even more, because if we can get some more money in there, we get more time to do stuff.
Because time equals money, and that's why Clockstoppers gets so much money. That's right, because it has so much time in it. So much time for DJ contests. So once again, go to patreon.com slash system mastery. If you support us at the $5 level, you unlock that. Or you can support us at any level. You'll unlock bonus content for whatever you want to support us at, and anything helps us keep the shows running. You got it. That's how we do. So thank you so much. We will be back in another couple weeks with more Movie Mastery. And if you're a supporter, you can jump right on over and listen to us talk about the pilot episode of Smallville. So until we see you again, you have a good one.