Last night’s movie here at Our Humble O’Bode was the romantic comedy-slash-not quite time travel movie About Time (I know there aren’t enough dashes. I ran out. Sue me).

It was quite definitely a romantic comedy. It was not quite a time travel movie because, although Tim Lake, the guy narrating the story in the manner of Hugh Grant, could travel back in time, the way he did at one or two crucial moments of the film did not make sense to me – and before you make the very salient point that just about every time travel movie ever made did not, upon further reflection, make any sense at all, I have to point out that other time travelers did not move through time by climbing into a wardrobe (or, in a pinch, any dark, closet-like cubbyhole), clenching their fists and making the face other people make when they’re about to get slapped by a woman they’ve just made a drunken pass at. This is not, in other words, time travel as we have seen it in other movies. There is no flashing, whirlygig of a time machine and nothing especially remarkable happens except that Tim finds himself wearing the clothes he wore on the day he imagined himself going back to, and then he tries to act nonchalant as he climbs out of the wardrobe.

Tim uses his awesome time-traveling powers to do what any teenaged boy would do: Go after the girls. If he muffs the New Year’s Eve Party Kiss, or if he sploots a bottle of suntan lotion all over a pretty girl, no problem – he just clenches his fists, makes the funny face, and gets a do-over. It doesn’t help him get any girls, by the way. Oops, spoiler alert. But he does get a lot of practice.

When Mary finally enters the picture, they have one of the most charming first dates ever filmed (and possibly one of the oddest, because you can’t see it) and Tim doesn’t resort to time travel even when he does muff his lines or stick a spoon full of chocolate mousse in her eye. They have a delightfully lovely first date, she gives him her phone number and he wanders back to his apartment in a haze while an acoustic guitar plays an appropriately romantic number.

Back home, he learns that his landlord, a playwright, has just endured one of the most terrible opening nights of his career. This is the part of the movie where Tim learns the consequences of changing one thing with his awesome powers. He goes back to the beginning of the evening, goes to the play with his landlord and fixes everything that went wrong so the play is a huge success. BUT – if he spent the evening at the play, he couldn’t have met Mary, so her phone number vanishes from his possession and she has no memory of him.

For some reason, and this is the part that doesn’t work for me, Tim doesn’t ditch the playright, run off to the first dark closet he can find and do the clenchy-fist thing so he can have the most romantic first date ever filmed instead of helping his landlord. He just lives with the heartache of having to grope around the city blindly trying to find Mary again. And against all odds they meet again, but in the clumsiest, most contrived way conceivable, and again a third time (clench, grimace) in a not so clumsy way, but it still wasn’t the most romantic first date ever filmed.

And it doubly didn’t work for me when later he figures out how to use time travel to fix his sister’s awful relationship with her dirtbag boyfriend, then returns to his own time to find that his year-old daughter is not the daughter he had before. It’s still his daughter, but now she’s a brunette instead of a blonde. Rather than just accept that this is the consequence of using his awesome powers for good, as he did with his landlord, a guy he barely knows, he rewinds his life, effectively killing off the brunette daughter he just created, and lets her sister have her ruinous relationship with her dirtbag boyfriend so he can have his blonde girl back. Kind of a douche move, if you ask me.

But it’s not an awful movie. It’s actually kind of cute, if you don’t think about it too much and just enjoy the bits where Bill Nighy does what Bill Nighy does.