When I initially heard about Safety Not Guaranteed, the 2012 movie based on a 1997 joke classified ad, I wrote it off as a cynical cash-grab inspired by tired-out memes. Now that I’ve finally gotten around to watching it, I admit that I was wrong. This is a film that had a lot of promise and had me interested right up until the end, when the viewer’s expectations are subverted, and not in a good way. Spoilers for the movie follow.
Darius (Aubrey Plaza) is an intern at a Seattle news magazine who is sent on assignment with reporter Jeff (Jake Johnson) to interview Kenneth (Mark Duplass) about the unusual classified advertisement. Jeff has an ulterior motive, which is to seek out an old summer girlfriend named Liz (Jenica Bergere). While Jeff fails in his initial approach to Kenneth, Darius has better luck becoming a part of his scheme to travel back in time.
Here is where things begin to get interesting. Jeff’s attempt to reconnect with his old flame parallels the reasons Darius and Kenneth have for traveling back in time. Darius wishes to prevent the death of her mother, which she blames herself for. Kenneth wants to go back to prevent the death of his girlfriend, who he claims was killed when a car crashed into her home.
Jeff discovers that his old girlfriend has succumbed as everyone does to the ravages of age. She is still attractive, yet not the young thin woman that he remembers. He begins to bully the other intern on the trip, Arnau (Karan Soni), wanting him to experience the things he no longer can, to live life to the fullest.
“You can’t go back” is the message of this movie. Everything about it screams “the past is gone!” Darius’s dead mother, Kenneth’s car crash crush, Jeff’s mid-life crisis. Arnau, the one character who doesn’t yet have any regrets, responds to the question of what time he’d like to go back to by saying, “I’m fine here,” yet through his subtle creepy questioning of Darius and some great physical acting we know he’s also struggling with fear of missing out. There is a chance to tie everything together with this message, and conclude everyone’s arc in a satisfying manner. The film doesn’t even crack 90 minutes, so there’s plenty of time to get it done.
Yet the film ends as Darius and Kenneth disappear into the past. This time machine fanboat built by a grocery store stock boy from stolen parts works. You can go back after all! All that build-up about Kenneth’s instability and fragile mental state was a red herring. The lies about his relationship and the car crash didn’t actually mean that he was crazy. Or maybe they did, and it’s the good kind of crazy, the one that lets him Beautiful Mind his way to the right answer.
Either way, his success ruined the film for me. The shoe-horned in federal agents chasing him down (apparently unable to find him putting Campbell’s Tomato Soup on the shelves at his place of employment) could have been eliminated entirely. They rushed the film to this unsatisfying conclusion as Kenneth’s crimes were too galling for him to be allowed to get away with it.
If at the end the fanboat spins up with its mechanisms as Arnau and Jeff watch from the shore and then whines and grinds to a halt, or it burns a hole through the hull and the boat fills with water as Kenneth despairs and Darius comforts him, the already well-established message would be nicely reinforced. Whatever method was employed, Safety Not Guaranteed could have been elevated from a simply entertaining film to a great one.
