Not a broken record, just a good-hearted time travel movie.
Two years ago, I wasn’t a fan of the made-for-Peacock movie “Meet Cute,” which had Kaley Cuoco playing a woman desperate to make Pete Davidson her dream guy by going back in time through a tanning machine. I felt it was pushy with the subject matter and sometimes mean-spirited with how she has to kill multiple versions of herself.
Two years later, I’m finding myself charmed by the made-for-Hulu movie “The Greatest Hits,” which is about a woman who needs to find the one hit song to take her back in time and save her dead boyfriend. The way it would work is that the first song they’ve heard would send her back for the duration of the song, unless she turns off the record player. She has to wear headphones in order to prevent her triggers, because she wouldn’t want to travel back in time at the moment her car had a fender bender with another car. The driver she hit wouldn’t want to get the police involved, now would he?
Time travel movies can take many different approaches from “Back to the Future” to “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” to “The Terminator” to “Hot Tub Time Machine” to “About Time” to “Avengers: Endgame” to “The Adam Project.” And they have their own rules of how time must go, and depending on how the films handle them, it’s quite intriguing.
The time traveling girl is Harriet (Lucy Boynton), and she needs to keep finding the record to save her boyfriend Max’s (David Corenswet) life. Her DJ best friend Morris (Austin Crute from “Booksmart”) tries to be her voice of reasoning, by saying that maybe she wasn’t meant to save him. But these romantics, they think otherwise.
In the meantime, she attends support groups, hosted by Dr. Evelyn Bartlett (Retta), and meets a new member David (Justin H. Min), who lost both his parents. It becomes a complication for her, because she still wants to save Max, and she starts to develop feelings for David. And now, she’s faced with a question: should she change the past or let time take its course?
In the tradition of genres of its kind like “Happy Accidents,” it’s obligatory that David has to not believe Harriet and her time travel triggers at first. I mean, is there a single movie character who can acknowledge that other people think fantasies are fantasies and not realities? They should, at least, say: “I know it sounds crazy and I’ve seen this kind of cliche a dozen times before. And I know this is reality, but this is a fantasy happening in reality.” People live in the real world too much.
But at the very least, David soon warms up to Harriet’s condition and what she must do. I won’t spoil anything, but it doesn’t have to sound so obvious as the premise would explain.
“The Greatest Hits” was written and directed by Ned Benson, who made all perspectives of “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” and was one of the screenplay writers for “Black Widow.” Here, he adds a nice soundtrack, some sweet performances from the leads (Boynton, Corenswet, Min, and Crute), and an honest and consistent nature to the girl’s own meaning of life.
Do we always need special effects to time travel? Not really. “About Time” proved that, and so does “The Greatest Hits.” Besides, the movie isn’t about time travel as the premise would suggest. It’s about thinking of other people, and what decisions must be or have been made. It all depends on whether or not Harriet can change her past. But whatever happens we support her. Play the next song.
Streaming on Hulu This Friday
