There's a thing where when a bad movie is bad but it's for kids it feels like people behind movies are like "ehh it's for kids it's fine". To an extent that's true because kid do not care about quality. Or more accurately kids don't understand quality. If they did things like Transformers and Despicable Me wouldn't be franchises. The former is indecipherable and the latter was surpassed incredibly by **MegaMind**. This movie triggers a lot of those same thoughts in me. There are parts of this movie that feel like many of the utterly trash random "for kids" movies I've seen. There's child actors trying to spit out technobabble and technically they're saying words and technically those words are techno babble but there's no rhyme or reason to them. At one point in this movie the smart kid start mouthing off about triangles and it's supposed to show he's intelligent but it just sounds weird. I wish film makers would find better ways of showing intelligence than just obsessing about details in one tiny thing. There are weird obstacles in these random kids movies like the nerdy kid who can't jump over 2 feet of water without drowning in what is essentially a moving puddle. And then there's my favorite which is when they're doing it wrong. Which is what I call it when they start using terms poorly. Like quantum computers.

The "time toys" are devices from the future. A military contractor uses his quantum computers to bring back plans from the future only to lose control of them when they arrive. The plans turn out to be some devices which our protagonists deem "toys". The toys themselves are a mix if clear and unclear. [spoiler]There's the face mask that let's you look like anyone you see. Clear. There's the shoes that let you move fast and walk on walls (in a hilarious obvious scene where rebuild the room sideways and turned the camera 90 degrees). There's gloves that make you strong (and fast?). There is also a hat that makes you a genius somehow. A gun that shoots out like 8 different liquids. It doesn't look impressive but it does lead to a disgusting poop joke that I imagine was supposed to be funny but instead drove me close to gagging. And then there's a top that can _incapacitate_ someone but messing up their hair and sometimes making them a laughing mess. [/spoiler]

The toys are somewhat interesting even if I wish they were more clear but the real problem I have is they don't drive any character development and they could have. Matt is the closest one with his crush on a girl who is too shy to speak to and his toy (the mask) lets him talk to the girl. He finds out she's not as shallow as he thinks and they actually have more in common than he thought. (For the record no kid that young "loves" Catcher in the Rye). I would have liked to see more development with him but honestly for what this movie is it was fine. The problem is no one else gets this. Mel is the dumb kid who becomes smart with the _smart hat_ but nothing really comes from his character. There are beats but nothing really develops it feels unsatisfying when at the end of the movie [spoiler]he likes studying for math now[/spoiler]. The same thing with Boomer who is, as most tv dweebs are, filled with fears and hypochondria and then at the end of the movie [spoiler]a wannabe track start just because he had fast shoes which he never really uses to run in the entire movie[/spoiler]. Now Boomer's case is especially traumatic because it feels built in. Her development is when he can't jump across the pond. Later in the movie she has to jump across something pond like and he does but at no point does he develop confident in it. I wanted to see her jump across anything while wearing the shoes but it never happens. Last and of course least is Eddie who gets the _gloves of fighting_ and maybe they could have centered the bullying around him and that could have been his struggle but honestly he just doesn't have anything going on he doesn't change as a character in the slightest. In the weird "X days later" epilogue Eddie isn't doing something that shows he was changed by the time toys. He's just doing something random.

But despite the many issues I have with the movie I think it's a solid kids film. While there are specific things that don't make sense as a whole the movie does. Which is a blessing. It's a fun romp even if wildly unrealistic. The reveal about the time toys is that [spoiler]they are indeed just toys.. from the future.. 25 years into the future. The movie asks the viewer to believe that in the future we'll have hats that make you smart, shoes that make you run 80 miles per hour, and a mask that can make you look like anyone and these are just the toys that children play with. Between that and the quantum entanglement computer it was very frustrating to buy into this world. But the low level stuff the character relationships and 70% of the dialog was workable. Still not sure how Ed Bagley Jr's **Wiz** character keeps appearing and disappearing. The ending was too cheesy to live and this is coming from someone who loves happy endings.

Whoa whoa whoa edit time. I forgot about the incomprehensible time travel aspects.
[Spoiler]
Ok so the premise in short is that they build a machine to grab something from the future. It was supposed to be blueprints but instead there were toys. The future encyclopedia (futurepedia) says the world will go bad. Then they fix everything and the futurepedia says everything is fine and we find out that our main character left the toys there for himself as a kid.. but then why was the world ever going bad it couldn't have been because we start the movie with the good ending "I told my son to leave his toys there".
[/spoiler]