Time Is Up Review: Time for These Actors to Stop Acting

Image courtesy of IMDB.com

By Kat Kaderabek 

A conglomeration of every horrid romance trope imaginable, Time is Up might be the worst film starring Bella Thorne yet. The film, originally in Italian, was also filmed in English and premiered on Amazon Prime streaming services. The initial reaction to this movie is complete awe at the audacity filmmakers had in producing this obviously copied and unoriginal piece of bad acting. Picture this: the opening of After meets a poorly made attempt at the cinematography of Euphoria meets a condensed version of The Vow. There you have it: Time is Up. 

It opens with a monologue by Thorne about particles in the void, promising some epic love story about to take place. In actuality, the film audience sees the same romance tropes played over and over except Bella Thorne and her real-life fiance, Italian singer Ben Mascolo, star as the leads. It is a wonder that their real-life chemistry doesn’t even manage to fold over into a film about love.  

Thorne plays her role as a brainy physicist named Vivien almost comically. It is unintuitive to view her as a smart and quirky nerd when her character oozes sexual charisma and destructive habits. Instead, Vivien dates a rockstar swimmer on the school team, Steve, who competes against tattooed bad boy and Vivien’s soon-to-be love interest, Roy, played by Mascolo. Roy is originally from Italy, but now lives in a trailer park swarming with drugs and gang members. In his time off from training to get a swimming scholarship to college, he takes care of his little sister while his father slaves away at the mechanic shop he owns just to make ends meet. He is everything a perfect princess-like Viven should avoid which means she is drawn to him like a magnet. 

Even with her controlling—and cheating—boyfriend Steve, Vivien manages to fall for Roy slowly and even galivants through Rome with him while their high school swim team is there to attend a swim meet. Roy and Steve are both each other’s biggest competition on the swim team. Because every high school team competes in Rome for a swim meet and any regular physicist genius can fly out there to surprise her boyfriend. The lengths to which the writers of this film will go is astonishing; however, they never claimed believability in opening credits. It is a romance, after all. 

After finding her boyfriend cheating with his swim coach in Rome, Vivian runs away and Roy gives chase, only for her to be hit by an oncoming car and sent into a coma. When she wakes, she has no recollection of the incident or the day leading up to the accident. Steve takes the opportunity to pretend nothing ever happened and the two continue dating. But soon there are cracks in Steve’s story and Vivien discovers his treachery. 

Ultimately, Vivien runs to Roy, and the two, bound by an unseen eternal love, quite literally ride off into the sunset. The final scene of the movie shows the two speeding down a highway to nowhere, carefree and alive. 

Bella Thorne’s acting is nonexistent and cringe-worthy; she spends most of the film pursing her lips together in an attempt to make them look bigger. This results in her not moving her mouth for many of her lines which then come out murmured and inaudible. Her character is also unbelievably dull, and the same could be said of the other type-casted roles. Each character only has one personality trait. Her best friend is the bad influence who is loyal to a fault, Steve is the seemingly perfect boyfriend who strays too far from the relationship, and Roy is the wounded boy who is just misunderstood. The romantic tropes here are boring and overdone. 

Even the scenery cannot compensate for the dreary plot and bad acting. While the audience does receive several breathtaking shots of Rome, most of the movie feels like the director and costume department was trying to mimic the style of HBO’s Euphoria but failed. Much of the film is composed of wide-angle shots of men swimming, long reels of scenery, and distracting transition pieces that mean nothing in the next scene. The production of this film was just as poor as its plot and acting. 
Unfortunately, this film is irredeemable. To offer the movie the benefit of the doubt, maybe this film was meant for a niche audience, though it is unclear who that audience is that would enjoy these overdramatic, overused romance tropes. In the end, it is not worth the time to invest in Time is Up unless you are looking for a good cringe.