Another well done film that delivers far more than what they're promoting in the ads. To dismiss this as being Groundhog Day redone as a thriller is selling this very short, seeing that Duncan Jones (director of Moon, the son of David Bowie) adds far more depth and feeling into it and moves beyond the story gimmick, mining it for much more. Did you see the Denzel Washington movie from a few years back Deja Vu? Imagine that, but much, much better.
Jake Gyllenhall is a military pilot that awakens in an unfamiliar environment - he's on a train, the girl across from him knows him, and he's struggling to determine the gap of about 2 months between his last memory and the place where he is now. He's quickly introduced into the project that he's participating in - he's reliving the last 8 minutes of memory recovered from a bomb detonation in Chicago that very same morning, with orders from Vera Farmiga (George Clooney's love interest in Up In The Air) to find the bomb, and find the bomber responsible for it. Jeffery Wright is Vera's superior, partly responsible for the science behind the program that allows Gyllenhall's character to re-experience the same 8 minutes over again.
There's a great twist to the movie that really adds a strong emotional tether to the whole film - in another director's hands, this would have been a whiz bang, far less brainier affair than what this turned out to be. He manages to elicit sympathy for everyone involved, giving a bit more dimension to characters that would have most likely turned out to be two dimensional stock characters that advance the story more than add any real substance to the film.
Big ups to Canadian comic Russell Peters in his role in the movie.