| Down Time is a strange attempt to mix concrete Northern social realism and Bruce-Willis-style cliffhanger thrills, with balls of fire billowing up empty lift shafts and so forth. Paul McGann plays an ex-police psychologist, retired through ill health, drafted in to dissuade miserable single mother Chrissy (Susan Lynch) from throwing herself and her child off the top of a tower block. He succeeds, though in so doing betrays some of the problems that caused him to quit his job. He then pursues Chrissy romantically, during the course of which he, she and her little boy become stuck in the tower block lift, which then starts ascending and descending at random when hoodlum squatters break into the control box and mess about with it for an idle laugh. With its bizarre and somewhat improbable scenario, its odd mix of whimsical light romance, grim-up-North-style melodrama and explosive stunt action, Down Time as a whole doesn't really come off. The behaviour of key characters borders on the arbitrary, the "yobs" who cause all the problems go curiously unpunished and the ending barely makes sense. However, the lengthy mid-sequence in which McGann rescues (and is rescued by) Chrissy from the perilously dangling lift is, though predictable in its outcome, gripping enough. --David Stubbs |
