11:14 is a movie about irony. It tells the entangled tales of a bunch of people who nearly all commit criminal acts. What attracted me to this 2003 indie movie was the stellar cast, which includes the late Patrick Swayze, Hilary Swank, Colin Hanks, Henry Thomas, and more. I thought the movie was kind of fun until about halfway through it, then I had it all figured out and lost interest.

The story begins with a drunk man (Henry Thomas of E.T.) talking on his cell phone while driving. As he passes under a bridge, he hits something and gets out realizing that it is a man. He freaks out and tries to hide the body in the trunk, then the police show up and arrest him for having an expired license. When the cop (Clark Gregg) searches the car and finds the body, he thinks Thomas is some kind of serial killer.

Patrick Swayze plays the father of a rebellious teenage girl (Rachel Leigh Cook) who is pregnant and trying to get her boyfriend to pay for the abortion. When that unlucky guy decides to rob the convenience store where he works, he asks his co-worker (Hilary Swank) to go along with it. She agrees so long as he shoots her first, because she doesn't want to lose her job.

With all that going on, some punk teenage kids (Colin Hanks) are driving around town throwing donuts at vehicles and causing all kinds of trouble. They also wind up in some serious trouble of their own, including one guy (Ben Foster) who finds himself without a certain body part after an accident involving a car window slamming shut while he was trying to urinate out of it.

The title of the movie, 11:14, has to do with the time when all of this stuff happens. Every character is connected in one way or another, and it all centers around this minute in time where their lives are forever changed, or ended. Because of all the crisscrossed story lines, you will have to deal with a lot of overlapping events. This movie is barely over 80 minutes long, and that involves you having to watch a lot of the same scenes from different angles.

I found my interest in the characters and their stories beginning to wane about halfway through the movie. The reason was that I had almost everything figured out, then the movie makes me go back and watch parts play out that were already pretty obvious. In the order that the individual stories are told, you are often revealed the ‘ending' first and then get to see how things came to that point, and that took a lot of the fun out of the thing. Sure, there were a couple of surprises, but some things meant to be a surprise were way too obvious from the start. That made watching the last half hour of this movie feel like I had already seen most of it before.

In the end, I can't say that I cared too much for 11:14. It was nice to see a healthy, almost chubby, Patrick Swayze in a movie after seeing how emaciated he looked in the last months of his life, and it's a shame that his career dwindled down into him making stuff like this.

The DVD has a few extras and a commentary from writer/director Greg Marcks, but I wasn't interested enough to watch any of them.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age