Like Army of Darkness, the heroes of timeline spend most of their time in the 14th century battling bad guys while trying to make it back to the present day. After the archeologist, Professor Johnston (Billy Connolly), gets trapped in the middle ages after going through a secret government time machine, the government hires a group of the professor’s students and the professor’s son, Chris (Paul Walker), to go back in time and bring him back. Supposedly they have to send these kids because no one else really knows what it would be like to live in those times and therefore be unable to mingle in.

As soon as the group gets into the past, they are immediately attacked by knights. They are soon captured but soon escape and run around fighting and crawling through tunnels and falling in love with 14th century French girls. They eventually end up playing a large role in a battle that happens to be going on the very day they arrive.

Needless to say, by the time you leave the theater the important characters are still alive and the attractive ones are hooked up. Time travel seemed to be the missing ingredient in the relationship between Chris and Kate (Francis O’Conner) and Marek (Gerard Butler) successfully wins the hand of his French woman (Anna Friel).

But Timeline goes nowhere. The story itself is hardly engaging and plagued with improbabilities and impossibilities. I never once felt like the characters were behaving in ways that real people would actually behave in their circumstances. At first, the group is anxious about time travel, as if it were bungee jumping or something. And when they get there, they act like they’re in some sort of medieval amusement park.

Timeline does have a number of relatively fun action sequences and battle scenes and does keep up a rather playful atmosphere. But it hardly makes up for the absolute ridiculousness of the rest of the film. Years to come, when VH1 does a series on bad movies of the early 21st century, Timeline will be on the list.

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