For all the talent arrayed to make it, Clockstoppers is a one-gimmick film. There is nothing particularly wrong with that – such is the basis of all good science-fiction stories according to some, of being able to imagine one change to the laws of physics, science etc and logically extrapolate from that what might then happen. Clockstoppers does an okay job of this – although one big scientific quibble one had was being able to have car chases while in Hypertime – would the car itself still not be in normal time? More importantly, wouldn’t such things at the rate at which an engine burns fuel or the laws of inertia during turns still be in operation, preventing the vehicle being able to conduct a chase at near-FTL speeds?

In some ways, you can see that Clockstoppers has been designed as a special effects vehicle – of exploring the Bullet Time effects novelty created by The Matrix (1999), where hundreds of cameras were placed in an array to take high-speed shots of a kinetic object and give the impression of moving around the object while it is seemingly frozen or slowed in motion. If anything, Clockstoppers is a reworking of the old Rene Clair silent film The Crazy Ray (1925) with modern CGI effects. As Frakes has demonstrated on his Star Trek films, his forte was less a good sense of story than it was an eye for mounting impressive special effects scenes. There is some novelty to watching Clockstoppers’ scenes of the teens running around stilled objects, of being able to part droplets of water that have been stilled in mid-fall like they were a curtain.

Outside of the rather slight gimmick, there is not much to the film. The time-freezing idea is never put to anything more than a series of juvenile possibilities – stopping time and then restarting it so as to let a dog pee in an officious traffic warden’s cart, puncturing a tagger’s can of paint so it sprays their face, putting a teen’s nose ring through the spokes of a bicycle tire, embarrassing a dishonest used car salesman. There is a very silly sequence where the invisibly time-frozen teens help their geeky friend upstage a rival in a rapping competition. There is much focus on teen activities – skateboarding sequences, bike stunts, rapping – as though the filmmakers had consulted a marketing study focus group to be sure they appealed right across the board to all children’s niche interests. This could have been quite good had it been made as an adult film – one can imagine a good deal of possibility inherent in the idea if it had been conducted say as a thriller – but the film is unfortunately trapped down in its juvenile focus.