REVIEW: 'Safety Not Guaranteed'

Movies can sometimes sneak up on you. Not just in the sense of one slowly pulling you in as you watch it, but also in terms of a movie hitting theaters. Safety Not Guaranteed is a film that does both of those things, and did both in very stealthy ways.

I actually hadn't heard of Safety Not Guaranteed until a few weeks ago, when I first caught a trailer online. Thinking it was a film that wasn't going to be released for months, I started preparing a post to share the trailer, but then realized that I had somehow missed the trailer when it came out months ago. In reality, the film was just a few weeks away from premiering. Thankfully, Washington, D.C., got Safety Not Guaranteed only a week after it began its limited opening.

Safety Not Guaranteed, a film based on a classified ad that read,"Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. Safety not guaranteed," is a film that on, on the outside, appears to be very simple. The film really only has four main characters. It runs less than an hour and a half. That outward simplicity is a trick though. Safety Not Guaranteed has a great deal of heart, and its story will completely pull you in.

Aubrey Plaza, best known as the deadpan April on Parks and Recreation, plays Darius, a magazine intern who agrees to go along with Jeff, a reporter played by New Girls' Jake M. Johnson, to track down whoever placed the time-travel classified ad. Firmly believing that whoever would place such an ad is crazy, Jeff, Darius and fellow intern Arnau (Karan Soni) track down Kenneth, the man who placed the ad. Mark Duplass plays Kenneth, a man who believes the government is following him and insists on complete secrecy when it comes to his time-travel plans.

Plaza and Duplass, while appearing to be an odd couple, absolutely sell the growing chemistry between their characters. It's not rushed or forced. The two are perfect as strangers who sweetly begin to become closer. Plaza absolutely has disengaged down, giving viewers that side of her week after week in Parks and Recreation. Watching her play a character with a quiet intensity was a welcome change.

A big theme of Safety Not Guaranteed is the question of whether or not you can ever rediscover a perfect moment in your life. The feeling you get from your favorite song or the moment you were in love before everything fell apart. Both Darius and Kenneth have their reasons for wanting to go back in time. Jeff himself, while not involved in the time-travel plot, reveals that he really took this assignment to find his high school girlfriend again and recapture what he once had there. As Safety Not Guaranteed shows, maybe you can find those moments again, but at what cost? What are you missing in the present by holding onto what you no longer have?

As I mentioned before, Safety Not Guaranteed is a stealthy film. You'd think that a movie about a guy claiming to have the ability to time travel would make that its main plot point, but by the end of the movie, I found myself so engrossed in the film's characters that I had forgotten to ask whether or not Kenneth would actually succeed in his time-travel mission. In the end, that didn't matter as much as the journey the characters were on.

Safety Not Guaranteed is getting a slow rollout right now. If you have it in your city right now, take advantage of that opportunity. If you don't have it yet, start asking your local cinemas why not. If you miss it now, you're going to have to start looking for a time-travel ad of your own.