`Timeline' goes by fast, even if you're not having fun.(Chicago Tribune)

Byline: Michael Wilmington

"Timeline" is a briskly plotted and paced time travel adventure movie that often seems as ephemeral as a clock-tick. Taken from the 1999 Michael Crichton novel about young archeologists recruited for a mysterious corporate time-travel project and then almost stranded in 14th Century France in the midst of a famous battle in the Hundred Years War (between the French and English), it's a fast and flashy production starring Paul Walker, directed and produced with admirable gloss and energy by Richard Donner and wife Lauren Shuler Donner. Most of the time, it's fun to watch. But, in addition to the usual cliches and bursts of illogic, along with some painfully awkward romance, there's something light and insubstantial about this movie. It almost floats away as you watch it.

Perhaps that's partly due to Crichton's overly movie-friendly style of writing _ though, in fact, the novel works in many of the ways the movie doesn't. In the film, we see a time-journey project run by unscrupulous techno-mogul Robert Doniger (David Thewlis) and accidentally discovered by a plucky band of Yale archeology students and teachers, including Chris (Walker of "The Fast and the Furious"), Kate (Frances O'Connor), Andre Marek (Gerald Butler), Stern (Ethan Embry) and Francois (Rossif Sutherland). These Yalies stumble into the operation after some amazing discoveries at the site of an ancient Middle Ages castle, La Roque, including an ancient note recognizably in the handwriting of their vanished professor, Edward Johnston (Billy Connolly).

Doniger, a shifty, glib billionaire, talks them into a hasty rescue operation, using his invention to slide through a "wormhole in time" and whisk back to 1357 during the very six hours when the last battle for the castle will be fought _ and the English will lose. But there are all sorts of distractions in the 14th Century Dordogne Valley, including sadistic knights, chases, scientific discoveries and even beckoning romance with beauteous Lady Claire (Anna Friel). All this keeps the time jockeys racing around madly to find the prof, beat the clock and get back through that wormhole before it closes.

The book, which gave the travelers several ...