5ive Days to Midnight (2004)

Lack of good storyline.

i must have seen a different film!!

Expected more

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

While visiting the graveyard of his beloved wife with his daughter Jesse (Gage Golightly), the physics professor John T. Neumeyer (Timothy Hutton) finds a case with a police dossier relating his death in five days. He initially believes it is a sick prank from the brilliant but deranged physics student Carl Axelrod (Hamish Linklater), but when a series of events related in the documents occur, he realizes that the file has been sent from the future. With the support of Detective Irwin Sikorski (Randy Quaid), whose name is indicated in the file as in charge of the investigation of his death, and suspecting of everybody including his girlfriend Claudia Whitney (Kari Matchett) that has a blurred hidden past, J.T. tries to change the future and his fate. But Carl believes that any modification in the time-line will jeopardize mankind and the future of the planet."Five Days to Midnight" is a good mini-series with a quite original story that blends action, thriller, sci-fi and drama in an intriguing way. Unfortunately the plot has the usual holes and flaws relative to time-travel. For example, if Jesse sent the dossier from the future, why not write a note to her father asking him to keep the open mind and explaining the whole situation? This would be the simpler and most rational way to advise J. T. Neumeyer how to prevent his death and eliminate his list of suspects. Therefore there is a great incoherence in the plot. In Brazil, the DVD was edited and released with 148 minutes running time, in a regretful but usual procedure of the Brazilian distributors. The mutilated edition destroys the original work of the director and writer, and the viewer loses many references along the story. Anyway I found that the weak climax of the plot could be improved by the writer since this mini-series has a great premise and deserved a better conclusion and resolution. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Cinco Dias Para a Morte" ("Five Days To the Death")

Wow, I'm amazed at how cool this film was. The entire construction of plot, character and general build is just amazing.What I do not like about it is that the town is supposed to be Everett Washington, but is actually Vancouver, British Columbia.While I think that the entire film is just awesome, the setting should have been Vancouver. It is just very obvious.The buildings, streets, general layout all points to Vancouver...the train station, sky-train, buses and Chinatown/Gastown all reads Vancouver, so why not just call it Vancouver.That aside, what a magnificent film, cast, crew and writers. I am really overwhelmed by the entire package, and yes...I knew who had sent the briefcase, but no...I was not expecting the murderer to be who it was, although I had a suspicion.Very clever, very crafty.It just comes to show, that there are still some creative heads in the film industry with original ideas.

Well done I had gone to the local video store to do a exchange because the night before we got Once upon a time in Mexico and trust me I don't return movies unless they really suck.Anyway I asked about 5 Days to midnight and the clerk said well it was not renting too good but what the heel I took it anyway and we were really surprised even though it was in 4 parts but at that my wife and I watched the first 2 and went to bed the first thing in the morning she says coffee is on I'm taking our daughter to school and you can walk the dog and then we can finish the movie.And I'm glad I took a chance I would have to say this film kept us thinking right up until the end,I hope Lions gate has more of that suspenseful talent lurking around at their studios in the future.Thanks for a great film.

Rating: ** out of ****The two-hour Sci-Fi Channel made-for-TV movies may almost always suck, but you can usually rely on their miniseries for quality acting, writing, and special effects (I loved Taken and Children of Dune, really liked Dune, and there is nothing currently on TV that can compete with the new Battlestar Galactica). Five Days to Midnight breaks the channel's success streak, proving to be easily its worst miniseries to date. 5DTM stars Timothy Hutton as J.T. Neumeyer, a physics professor with a young daughter (I forget the actress's name, but she looks a lot like a young Drew Barrymore) and a life insurance agent named Claudia for a girlfriend (Kari Matchett). While visiting his late wife's grave on a Monday morning, his daughter discovers a briefcase nearby. Upon opening the case, J.T. is a little shocked to discover that the contents are files pertaining to his own murder, which will occur in five days, at 3:55 A.M. on Friday.He initially laughs it off as a hoax, but when a few of the little "prophecies" come true, he becomes a fast believer and sets out to find out who would murder him and why. He has only a few clues, but there is a list of suspects: Carl Axelrod, an eccentric student of his; Brad, his financially desperate brother-in-law; Roy Bremmer, a man he's never even heard of; and even his own girlfriend Claudia, who is not all that she appears to be. With the clock ticking down and only the help of a homicide investigator (Randy Quaid), J.T.'s obsession with saving his own life may come at the cost of many others.Undeniably, 5DTM boasts one of the niftier premises in recent memory. Playing like a mix of Minority Report meets 24, the combination of sci-fi and mystery has always appealed to me, so there's no question that a good portion of the miniseries is genuinely engaging and entertaining (mostly in the beginning and middle segments). A lot of the series is intentionally predictable, and in a fun way, like you just know that gift from his girlfriend will be the same parka he wears in that photo from the briefcase where he's lying dead, or the car his girlfriend rented will be that green Cherokee in that other photo, and so on and so forth. 5DTM also has fun with the implications of possible time travel and the changes one could set forth in the fabric of time. I was also thankful for the fact that a lot of the characters actually caught on to the possibility of time travel quickly and even accepted it without much question.There are a lot of decent to good performances, especially Timothy Hutton, who capably handles the functions of a likable everyman. The girl who plays his daughter is terrific as well, and Kari Matchett would be a dead-on match for Naomi Watts if she had a smaller nose and slightly larger cheeks. Angus Macfadyen makes for a menacing villain as Bremmer, who's so evil he clearly can't be Neumeyer's killer.Unfortunately, the miniseries begins to stumble by the second half of 'Day 4,' and is just a complete and utter mess by 'Day 5.' The writers can't seem to be able to keep much consistency in the film's concept of time travel. Without giving much away, when certain changes are made to the timeline in the film's climax, newspaper articles and photos from the future are also altered to fit the new timeline (kind of like in Back to the Future), and the changes occur immediately. However, in 'Day 2,' Neumeyer changes a woman's fate, preventing her from getting killed by a collapsing tree. After this change in time, his daughter then reads all the newspaper articles from the file the next day, which still state that the woman died because of the tree. Wouldn't that portion of the article have been altered?The climax is just terrible (moderate spoilers in this paragraph), with every major suspect conveniently converging in the same location with murder on their minds. Just as bad, at least three of the potential killers wouldn't have even targeted Neumeyer if not for the intervention of the briefcase itself, and the one suspect that continuously threatens his life also seems most likely to the deed, but a tacked-on, idiotic surprise revelation completely disregards that possibility, placing the blame firmly on one of the characters that wouldn't have killed him if not for the briefcase's intervention. I can't think of any plausible reason this person would have killed Neumeyer prior to the appearance of the briefcase, but a bullet that conveniently fits into a gun is supposed to lead us to believe it was this one character all along.The identity of the killer is perfectly predictable, since it's always the person we're least likely meant to suspect. Even though I came to the realization very early, I still doubted myself because, as stated earlier, there's just no reason this person would have any true motivation to kill Neumeyer without the briefcase.It's unfortunate, but with such an awful ending, I just can't go out of my way to recommend 5DTM. It's not the movie's only major flaw, the miniseries is constantly padded to fill its allotted running time, and the director goes insanely overboard on the choppy slow motion, often ruining any developing suspense or momentum. Had the miniseries been about forty-five minutes to an hour shorter, I might have said yes as a video rental, but unless if you've got lots of time to kill, this isn't rewarding enough to spend the time and money.