Just a minute – again and again and again.

Fifty-seven seconds. That’s how long it takes to make a coffee, delete a tweet, or – apparently – bodge your entire second chance at life with the same reckless impulsivity that ruined the first one. 57 Seconds wants to play in the same sandbox as Limitless or Looper, but ends up stepping on a rake, like some kind of time-skipping Sideshow Bob. It’s a time-travel revenge thriller where the smartest idea anyone has is “what if I just keep getting punched in the face over and over because I can rewind and maybe dodge it next time?”

Josh Hutcherson plays Franklin, a tech blogger whose moment of fame comes when he saves a Steve Jobs–like health-tech mogul (played with crusty charisma by Morgan Freeman) from an assassination attempt, only to pocket a strange ring that lets him rewind time. Not much time. Just 57 seconds. Not a minute. Not an hour. Not enough to fix a relationship, but just enough to redo a really good comeback – or, more often, take back a really dumb decision.

It’s a tantalising premise – tight, contained, easily gamified – but the film doesn’t trust it. Instead of playing with strategy or escalation, Franklin deploys his time-turning trinket like a toddler with an undo button. He uses it to cheat at gambling (with all the low key subtlety of Richard Pryor’s payroll swindler Gus Gorman from Superman III), impress his love interest, and wage a vendetta against Big Pharma, all with the grace and foresight of someone picking stocks based on horoscopes.

This isn’t stupidity in the charming, character-building sense. It’s stupidity as a structural flaw. The film builds entire scenes on the assumption that Franklin, despite knowing he can rewind time once per loop, will keep hurling himself into situations without any sort of learning curve. It’s like giving a toddler a scalpel and being shocked every time they cut themselves.

Hutcherson does his best to keep Franklin sympathetic, layering him with just enough sincerity to stop the whole thing tipping into Final Destination for the chronically shortsighted. But the script keeps undercutting him with logic loops that feel like someone’s taken a Black Mirror premise and run it through a screenwriting AI that’s only seen 90s thrillers and TikToks.

Morgan Freeman, meanwhile, could do this kind of role in his sleep – and possibly did. He delivers his lines with the bemused detachment of a man who once played God and now can’t quite believe he’s explaining quantum jewellery to the kid from Zathura. He’s not phoning it in, but the signal is definitely patchy.

Time travel stories rise or fall on the elegance of their mechanics and the sophistication of their participants. 57 Seconds has neither. Its rules are arbitrary, its stakes are fuzzy, and the film never seems to realise the most interesting thing isn’t how Franklin uses the ring, but how little he actually learns from it. There’s no strategy. No build. No sense of a plan evolving. Just Micro-Groundhog Day with none of the charm and all of the arrogance.

The final act pretends it’s earned its crescendo – a tech-laced morality play about power, revenge, and the cost of playing God with a wrist-mounted rewind – but it’s been too busy skipping character development and rewinding its own best moments to earn any emotional payout.

A tighter, smarter script might have made 57 Seconds fly be. As it stands, it’s a cautionary tale not about meddling with time, but about what happens when your protagonist keeps turning back the clock and still doesn’t think ahead.