This time travel/alternate time lines sci-fi thriller/romance starts off well, explores the predestination paradox with a creative bit of whodunit mixed in, but gradually botches it by trying too hard to throw sand in our eyes as the end draws neigh. (Spoilers throughout).

5ive days starts strong: In some kind of weird dreamlike prelude we are shown the MC dodging through a warehouse before being shot in the forehead and a bullet dropped on his dead neck. Then we switch to the main line with a “Five days earlier.” Of course, now we gotta watch the movie.

Our hero is typical for such genres: a physics professor with a dead wife and a strong, lovely daughter. And a love interest. Everything’s chugging along, when father and daughter come across a nifty looking shiny futuristic brief case next to the dead wife’s tombstone. A little puff of reality distortion that accompanies the appearance of the briefcase, that we see, but father and daughter don’t, tells us the fun has begun.

The brief case has a combination lock the father cracks in the dead of the night and finds an “Unsolved case” folder. The case documents are about his own murder and the rest of the plot progresses quite well and the lead actor (Timothy Hutton) and, to a lesser extent, his love interest (Kari Matchett) bring the tension to life.

The heart of the movie is equal parts the predestination paradox and a whodunit type twisty story with more and more people being added to the suspect list of who might want to kill our mild mannered physics professor. The predestination paradox is somewhat standard, but quite well done, but the growing (and often surprising) list of potential suspects was a novel addition to the genre for me.

Where things begin to turn sour for me is when the writers forget the maxim “Take out everything that can be taken out.” The love interest’s mysterious past and murky motives turn out to be that she’s married to the mob and the mob boss is coming for her and now for the professor and his daughter too. This whole bit starts to take up too much space and does not fit well for me.

But this alone wasn’t quite the deal breaker. What annoyed me no end was the detective turning on them. It was a twist left until the very end and a bit off the wall and even in the heat of the movie I was going, this doesn’t make sense, because people are going to wonder why one of the victims signed over the 10 mill worth of beach front property to the detective in charge just before she was shot.

They should have stuck to just the characters we all know from the start: The grad student, the over-extended friend and the lover are a good set. Instead of this cruddy diversion with the mob boss and the crooked detective, we could have maybe added in the doctor friend with some kind of cool motive.

So, there we are. Not a bad movie, but with too much thrown in at the end.

Extra points should de deducted because of too cute spellings, though it does make the title a very distinctive search string.