OxfordPress.com

Grade: B-

Verdict: Let's do this time warp again.

Details: Starring Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel. Directed by Gregory Hoblit ("Primal Fear"). Rated PG-13 for violence. 2 hours.

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Review: John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel) hears dead people.

One night in October 1999, he hooks up his long-gone dad's old ham radio. And guess who's on the other end? Dad (Dennis Quaid), talking to him from October 1969.

How, precisely, this works is the kind of thing best understood by people who write scripts for movies like Frequency (or maybe you could ask Stephen Hawkings). Anyway, the two Sullivans connect. More amazingly, they connect the day before Frank Sullivan -- that's Dad -- will be killed in a fire, heroically trying to rescue a drugged-out teenage runaway.

Run the other way, pleads his son who's spent three decades pouring over a scrapbook of dead-hero newspaper clips. And Frank does. And he survives. And suddenly, thanks to that one small change, everything past and present is oh-so-slightly different. On the good side, John has lots of photos with himself, his mom and his dad. On the not-so-good-side, a serial killer from the '60s has somehow been allowed to extend his murderous spree. So father and son -- one a fireman, the other a cop -- team up as time-warp detectives to track the murderer down and, yet again, change fate.

Frequency, which has the strong bones of a fine Harlan Ellison or Ray Bradbury short story, also has the burden of making itself viable for the length of a feature film. Thus, not only does it get too convoluted for its own good, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions on that whole space/time continuum thing. Further, the father-son bonding is laid on so thick that you almost want to rent Affliction to watch James Coburn's Oscar-winning performance and remind yourself what a bad dad can be like.

Still, director Gregory Hoblit, who suckered us so magnificently with Primal Fear, knows a mind-twisting script when he sees one. Not only does the film benefit from that "what if?" fascination of being able to change fate, but it allows Quaid and Caviezel to do some effective emotional button-pushing without pushing their luck.

The bottom line is that this movie works best for anyone who's ever wondered if he/she could change something -- be it the death of a loved one or betting on an obscure stock -- simply by being in the know and willing to risk the consequences.

It's a fantasy about control wrapped inside an unabashedly sentimental plot. But if you can get on its wavelength, it works.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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