Today's Mini-Review: Safety Not Guaranteed

Safety Not Guaranteed: ****/*****, or 8/10

Delightful indie comedy, courtesy of newbie director Colin Trevorrow, is first and foremost an ode to all the outcasts that don't follow society's expected patterns of social integration but prefer to stick to being themselves. Aubrey Plaza stars as the witty intern Darius, a young woman who has always had a hard time fitting in or making friends, and as such is relegated to do all the dirty jobs at the magazine publisher she works for, until she jumps at the chance to show her employers she can do more than refilling toilet paper. As it happens, a most peculiar newspaper add surfaces, wherein an unknown person is looking for a companion to travel back in time with him ('safety not guaranteed', it says, along with the advice 'to bring your own weapons'). Together with the arrogant but lazy reporter Jeff and her fellow intern Arnau (an Indian guy who is suffering from virginity, or so the overly horny Jeff seems to think), Darius is dispatched to track down the one who posted the add to see if he's for real, in the hopes of getting an interesting story out of it. What they find is a seemingly completely nutty supermarket employee named Kenneth (the comedically underrated Mark Duplass) who proves rather paranoid and prone to violent selfdefense of his privacy, so he won't let anyone come too close to him. Deciding to let the interns do all the hard work so Jeff himself – no so coincidentally – can seek out an estranged girlfriend in the area, Darius soon infiltrates Kenneth's life in order to get to the bottom of it all. She gets more than she bargained for as she soon considers the oddball a kindred spirit, who is all too serious about his quest to jump back in time, making her go through a rigorous training course before deciding on whether she's time traveler material. This naturally causes the pair to bond, despite the both of them engaging in some convenient truth-altering to get closer to the other. Meanwhile, Jeff finds his lost love and gets stuffed with all sorts of delectable pies, while Arnau may or may not have his cherry popped. Instead of allowing the time travel element to drive the plot in an effort to have the protagonists reconnect with their pasts and set their status as outsiders straight, Trevorrow cleverly opts to have them connect to each other in the present for their own mutual emotional gain. The film's message: 'here's to the losers, bless them all'. If you go in focusing on the time travel aspect the movie seems to be built around, expecting a big FX show, you'll be disappointed in that regard – the movie cost less than a million bucks for heaven's sake! – but few will find it impossible not to be charmed by the true heart and soul that drives this film and its likeable out-of-the-box characters. Not to mention the fact this flick contains its fair share of hilarious situations, including a night equipment raid at a science lab where the employees just so happen to be throwing a surprise birthday party. Mr. Trevorrow, Jurassic Park IV is all yours. If this appetizing film is any indication, an interesting result seems guaranteed.