'Source Code' review: Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan add heart to Duncan Jones' brainy film

Source Code' review
With Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga. Scientists send a pilot back in time to stop an explosion. Director: Duncan Jones. (1:33) PG-13: Violence. At area theaters.

Is "Source Code" a cerebral drama that believes it's a roller-coaster ride? Or is it an adventure flick with a headful of crazy ideas?

The truth is, it's in a little gray zone in between. More important, this is also the first film in a while to have a decent heart while quickening your pulse.

That begins on a speeding train, which is where Capt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds himself, hurtling toward Chicago one morning with no idea where he is, who the pretty girl (Michelle Monaghan) is with him or why he looks different in the mirror.

Suddenly, eight minutes later, a bomb blows up the train.

Yet after the explosion, he immediately awakens in a dank testing module, where Stevens — a military pilot and Afghanistan veteran — is informed by Capt. Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) that he has been recruited for a never-before-used secret program called Source Code.

Invented to fight terrorism, the program uses quantum physics and chemical synaptic-map mumbo jumbo to shuttle Stevens' consciousness back in time (or something like that) and into the body of a soon-to-die male passenger.

The catch? The process gives him only eight minutes to find the bomb and the suspect before a bigger catastrophe occurs.

So back Stevens goes, again and again, and as the story plunks its "Twelve Monkeys"-meets-"Groundhog Day" scenario inside of a house of cards built by Rod Serling and M.C. Escher, the truth emerges.

To reveal anything else about this top-shelf B-movie would kill the fun, but director Duncan Jones — whose slow, intriguing "Moon" had the opposite pacing as "Source Code" — has a way with mind trips, men in boxes and the potential for parallel lives.

Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley also reward attentive viewers with clues and references. They know their way around genre riffs: Jeffrey Wright's a hoot as an almost-mad scientist, Farmiga has a HAL-9000 lull to her voice, and Chris Bacon's music occasionally recalls the classic sci-fi scores of Jerry Goldsmith.

Gyllenhaal and Monaghan pull off the human moments within this intricate mousetrap — he's haunted, she's sprightly — and never get lost in the puzzle.

Though it doesn't need its last twist, "Code" clicks on several levels, including the important one where action movies still have a brain. (Review Source)

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