5ive Days To Midnight

My dad's wanted to watch 5ive Days to Midnight ever since it was first advertised on Sci-Fi. Sorry, Syfy. He bought the DVD at least a year to two ago, but we only got around to watching it over the course of last week.

The mini-series starts with Professor Neumeyer (Timothy Hutton) getting shot in the head. Then it flashes to five days earlier, a day which is simultaneously his daughter's birthday, and the day his wife died. While they visit her grave, a metal briefcase with "Professor J.T. Neumeyer" stamped on it appears out of thin air. They take it home, and after deciphering the passcode, Neumeyer finds a police file inside. The unsolved case of his murder in a strip club he's never visited, five days from now.

From there we see Neumeyer first try to determine if this is legit, by having a friend test the briefcase, check the blood on the slug that supposedly killed him against his own, and talk to the cop listed as the investigating officer. As he becomes more convinced that it's a real thing to be concerned about, we see him try to circumvent fate, by trying to flee, then by trying to remove all the people listed as suspects. No, I don't mean he turns into a serial killer, disposing of the people he fears may kill him. He tries to figure out what their grievance with him is, and resolve it. Unmake the sword, so to speak.

It's an interesting story at times, and I like that Neumeyer doesn't attempt to be secretive throughout. He doesn't start off telling everyone, but as he needs the help of his friends, he lets them in on what he's up against. You could argue that helped put him in danger, but given the circumstances, he was better off trying to enlist all the help he could. He's a physicist, not John McClane.

However, I don't entirely follow how he wound up dead in the original timeline. My dad's conclusion was it happened the same way. I pointed out that in the new timeline, there were several people at the club not mentioned as being there in the police report. People who would have to have been dead or not there at all, because if they had been present, there would have been no doubt as to the identity of the killer. He argued they were probably killed elsewhere. So why would Neumeyer and his murderer have ended up at this strip club? He had been there earlier in the series, as part of his "convince people not to kill me" strategy, but he was there at least partially because of the briefcase. He wouldn't have known the guy was a problem if his girlfriend hadn't seen the man's name listed as a possible suspect in the casefile. So I can't figure how things reached the point of him being shot without the briefcase's contents driving him to find who shot him and setting the whole thing in motion.

I may be overthinking again, but I can't understand why the killer would leave an unused bullet on the corpse, which just so happens to fit a gun Neumeyer can use to protect himself. Unless the person who sent the briefcase was there and found that extra round, and left it there in the hopes it would point the way to the killer. That having failed, it was at least in the casefile to be sent back to help the Professor.

Massive headache induced by time travel aside, it was a pretty decent mini-series. Some people give in to their worst demons, others act selfishly at first, only to come through when it counts.