2:22 (2017)

2:22 arrives with the hushed confidence of a film that believes numerology is a personality. An air traffic controller named Dylan blacks out at the same minute each afternoon, prevents a midair collision, and then spends the rest of the running time noticing that Grand Central Terminal repeats its commuters like a faulty carousel. There is a supernova, a pair of star-crossed birthdays, and an artist who paints the future because the plot requires someone to. The machinery of fate grinds along, pleasant enough, and entirely indifferent to the world outside its own head.

For a film so preoccupied with repetition, it is revealing what never repeats here: any recognizable progressive impulse. The cast is a wall of pale faces, with a single non-white performer tucked into the margins and given nothing to do. Sarah, our heroine, exists chiefly as the target of one man's destiny and another man's obsession, her agency arriving only in the final reel when the script remembers she has lines. The villain is a jealous painter, not an economy. The cosmic threat is a supernova, not a climate. Dylan's visions are supernatural, not neurodivergent, so the film declines even the accidental credit it might have earned.

We are left with a pulpy thriller that wants to be hypnotic and settles for tidy. Nobody lectures us. Nobody asks us to examine our complicity in anything. The film is too busy explaining its own clockwork to bother with moral instruction, and there is a strange integrity in that. As vintages go, this one is thin, faintly sweet, and best served cold to an audience that has already stopped asking questions. The cellar is largely empty. We log it accordingly.