A bad movie is a bad movie whatever you want to call it, so there was no escaping the fact that 2019’s Against the Clock was a disaster, regardless of the other two titles it carried at various points.
Writer and director Mark Polish’s conspiracy driven thriller is also known as Headlock or Transference depending on where you are or when you heard about it, but the common denominator is that nobody seemed to enjoy it very much, at least if we take a 25 percent audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 2.5/10 average on IMDb at face value.
The formulaic story follows a former CIA operative who decides to mount her own investigation into the serious accident suffered by her husband while he was on a mission of his own, but there’s naturally a cover-up in play that reaches right up to the highest echelons of government, leading to the standard “race against time to uncover the truth” tale that’s been done to death a thousand times over.
Despite its unwanted reputation for sucking under no less than three different monikers, though, Against the Clock/Headlock/Transference has thrown its status to one side in order to conquer the streaming ranks. Per FlixPatrol, the furiously repetitive and uninteresting genre film has cracked the worldwide watch-list on Paramount Plus, presumably because anything even remotely resembling an action-packed adventure will inevitably find itself enjoying a second wind on-demand.
Multiple titles is very rarely a good sign, and that’s been proven true yet again in spite of its nascent popularity.