‘Thirteenth Floor’ A Time-Travel Tangle

Centropolis, the company that made “The Thirteenth Floor,” has an incredibly cool logo of a zeppelin flying over a skyscrapered, art-deco city. Unfortunately, it shows up at the beginning, and it’s the last thing I can unreservedly recommend about the movie.

Too bad, too, because it has promise. The “X-Files”-like idea is that there’s a research lab on the 13th floor of an L.A. office building where they’ve figured out a way to travel through time and take on different personas, using virtual reality technology.

Douglas (Craig Bierko, the maniac and the one decent thing in “The Long Goodnight”) is one of the project’s designers and, when he’s suspected of killing his boss, he has to travel back and forth in time to try to clear his name.

First off, the movie takes place in 1937, 1999 and a weirdly golden and transformed 2024 (a friend pointed out that it seems not to have occurred to the filmmakers that 2024 is less than 25 years away, when L.A. is unlikely to look much different from today).

That’s three different time frames and three different places for us to get confused about who’s who and who’s supposed to be in love with whom (Bierko and Gretchen Mol’s unconvincing, undeveloped romance feels like something your parents told you when you were a question-happy 3-year-old: “Why are these two people in love? Because we told you they are”).

Throughout the film, I had a frustrating sense that it might be about to get interesting. Time travel is a fascinating, if difficult to film concept, and the movie is handsomely made. The ‘30s scenes have the brownish, drained-of-color look of old postcards, and the present is all sleek, modern and chromy.

But, aside from the inexplicable characters, it’s hard to hear much of the dialogue because the movie’s sound mix (or, maybe, sound frappe) is as muddy as the banks of the Mississippi must be now.

Sound issues merely add to the general, illusion-vs.-reality confusion about what’s going on in the movie.

“They say ignorance is bliss,” someone tells us near the beginning of “The Thirteenth Floor,” but I kept thinking that when the ignorance is mine, it’s more likely to be annoying than blissful.

Location: North Division, Spokane Valley Mall, Coeur d’Alene. Credits: Directed by Josef Rusnak, starring Craig Bierko, Vincent D’Onofrio, Gretchen Mol Rating: R