Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Joshua, as played by actor Nick Stahl who looks absolutely exhausted, which is probably why the overwhelming majority of the roles the young man gets require him to be exhausted, is absolutely exhausted. Joshua, in this little SciFi-esque thriller ‘Speed of Thought’, has the power to read minds and stuff, a power he uses to scam people in poker and also get over on the occasional piece of ass… in between performing espionage jobs for the government. But the reason Joshua is exhausted and depressed is because his life expectancy of 29 years is about to expire, which would exhaust and depress just about anybody I imagine. Joshua had accepted this unfortunate fact, until something happened which made him want to live. Yup… love. And love will lead to the truth. Can Joshua handle the truth?

Joshua works for the sneaky, shadowy government operative Bridger, played by actress Blair Brown who is type cast about as rigidly as Nick Stahl is type cast, and Bridger’s not the warmest bunny in the pen pushing her depressed telepath’s to their very limits. Fortunately for Joshua he does have his good friend and fellow telepath Kira (Taryn Manning) whose life expectancy is also about to expire, but more importantly he has the kind and gentle Sandy (Wallace Shawn) to lean on, Sandy being the director of the Telepathic School of the Gifted where Joshua and his kind reside and the one who makes sure that Joshua takes his meds to keep the voices out of his head. You see it’s the voices that eventually drive these telepaths insane by the time they turn thirty which requires these telepaths to make a critical decision on what to do about their lives after they go bonkers.

Then Joshua meets Anna (Mia Maestro). Anna is the daughter of some cat Joshua was running some government game on, but while on this mission he could feel the presence of another telepath in the room, a telepath that Bridger wants found and flushed out. Turns out Anna is this telepath even though she hasn’t had Joshua’s training and hasn’t figured out how to work all of her skills yet. The real strange thing about Anna, considering her age, is that she should’ve gone nuts by now. Hmm… peculiar.

Now Joshua is starting have his doubts. For starters he has this brand new sizzling hot girlfriend who is over thirty and not crazy, a girlfriend who he can hang with mentally but can’t physically touch. That sucks for Joshua and he would like to change that. Then his government overseers have all of the sudden turned into his government oppressors and seem overly concerned with his every single movement. Then Joshua gets a special visit from a mysterious mental friend who informs him that all isn’t what it seems and that he needs to grab his hot girlfriend and make a break for it because the Agents are-a-coming and they have bad intentions.

Directed by Evan Oppenheimer ‘Speed of Thought’ always had the feeling that it couldn’t get itself started up. It has all of this stuff going on like psychics, political intrigue, betrayals and lovers on the run but personally I sat there watching this movie waiting for it to take off and it just never seemed to happen.

The backdrop of the movie featuring the telepaths was interesting enough but where you would think the best part of the movie would be when the telepaths are occupying and invading your thoughts, it’s actually one of the more benign and boring parts of the movie because they don’t really do much there. They hang out amidst the hazy special effects, engage in more borderline inane dialog and… that’s about it. By the end of the movie the inner workings of the mind of the telepaths gets a little more interesting but the movie is pretty much over by then.

The cast is solid so the performances were good across the board, the story supporting the performances was okay, if not a little derivative of a few other movies with a touch of The X-men, a dash of The Matrix, and an injection of Inception to name a few but I did find the end game scenario presented to us to be a satisfying one, if also a completely predictable one.

I guess, at least to me, that ‘Speed of Thought’ felt too subdued. When you’re working with people’s imaginations, creatively speaking you would think you can do almost anything and this movie didn’t take advantage of that before settling down with being just a conventional run and chase thriller. We probably have no right to be, but we were a little disappointed with that.