‘Palm Springs’ a loopy time-loop flick
We’re going to reach a point where, really, it’s enough with the time-loop movies already.
“Palm Springs” — a mostly fun time-loop rom-com with an enjoyable dark streak that’s bowing on Hulu — suggests we’re not there yet.
Like 1993’s beloved “Groundhog Day,” 2014’s excellent “Edge of Tomorrow,” 2017’s fun “Happy Death Day,” “Palm Springs” gets its narrative kicks by having the same day occur repeatedly with similar but ultimately different goings-on.
Directed by Max Barbakow and penned by Andy Siara, “Palm Springs” stars Andy Samberg as a guest at a wedding in Palm Springs, Calif., who has long been stuck in a loop, and Christin Milioti as the maid of honor, who, eventually, gets trapped in it with him.
We meet Samberg’s Nyles as he wakes in the morning, becomes interested in the bare leg of his girlfriend, Misty (Meredith Hagner), and has relations with her, which are then followed by an awkward conversation that barely seems to mean anything to him.
He floats in the pool for a while, getting drunk on beers, and later sits at the open-air wedding reception very underdressed for the occasion.
Milioti’s Sarah, meanwhile, is pushing the bartender for a more generous pour from a bottle of red.
Nyles then captures Sarah’s attention with a series of maneuvers on the dance floors that suggest he almost knows the coming movements of every other guest, including a man who passes out.
After more alcohol for both of them, Nyles convinces Sarah to go somewhere with him. We next find them outside the window to a room in which Misty is cheating on Nyles.
“Why don’t you go in there and stop them?” Sarah asks.
“Trust me,” he assures her, “there is not a world where these two don’t end up together.”
This type of talk from Nyles will begin to make more sense to Sarah the next morning, when she wakes after a night with him that involves even more boozing and a very careless mistake on his part. Like him, she awakens to find it is, again, the morning of the wedding day. The film loses a bit of steam over its relatively short running time. Still, you’ll laugh more often than you won’t.