"Jesus, you're having a rough night."
— The police dispatcher to Officer Hannagan
A 2003 movie written and directed by Greg Marcks, 11:14 consists of five interlocking stories that take place late one night in a town called Middletown. Each story lasts about twenty minutes and begins about five minutes before the one that came before it, so that the movie ends more or less where it begins. Each story also casts a little light on the events of the earlier stories.
- Late one night, Jack Levine (Henry Thomas) is driving into town and talking on his cell phone. "Heh... I wouldn't say I'm drunk…" CRASH
- About five minutes earlier: Three teenagers, Tim (Stark Sands), Mark (Colin Hanks) and Eddie (Ben Foster), head out in a van for a fun night of driving all over town, throwing things out the window. This'll end well.
- About five minutes earlier: Frank (Patrick Swayze) takes his dog for an evening walk. In the cemetery, he is horrified to discover...
- About five minutes earlier: Buzzy (Hilary Swank) is minding the store when her friend Duffy (Shawn Hatosy) comes in with an immediate need for cash — and a desperate plan to get it.
- About five minutes earlier: Frank's daughter Cheri (Rachael Leigh Cook) heads out for a night of fun with her boyfriend. Their date takes a dark turn when…
That's about all that can be said about this movie without spoiling it.
This film provides examples of:
- All Love Is Unrequited: Buzzy clearly likes Duffy as more than a friend. Duffy is hopelessly in love with Cheri. Cheri is seeing Aaron behind Duffy's back. And playing them both so she can run away with Jack, who is likely just as expendable to her as the other two. This is kind of Cheri's thing, since she also cares nothing for the feelings of her parents who love her dearly.
- The Alleged Car: Cheri borrows one of these from her father. Whenever it stops, starting it again is a crapshoot.
- Asshole Victim: By the end of the movie, it's hard to feel too upset about Cheri's death.
- Also, Eddie, a total punk who wears a shirt that says "Legalize Crime," definitely suffers for his behavior.
- Back to Front
- Bad Liar: Tim. "I'm a klepto."
- Black-and-Grey Morality: Besides Norma, Officer Hannigan and the two paramedics, every other character in this movie ends up committing a crime of some sort.
- Black Comedy: Very black. This is a movie about ordinary people who really suck at doing bad things, so this shows up quite a bit.
- Brick Joke: The bowling ball, the donut on the windshield, the burning paperback, the rubber gloves… this movie is built out of Brick Jokes.
- Cannot Tell a Lie: Buzzy calls herself a "Bad Liar," but this trope describes her more accurately — a Bad Liar tries to lie and fails, but Buzzy seems to have given up trying.Hannigan: You were both in on this, weren't you?Buzzy: Y-yes.
- Coming and Going: Cheri and Aaron have sex in a cemetery. They come. He goes.
- Con Artist: Cheri and Jack.
- Chekhov's Armoury: Almost every background element or trivial action—from the burning book to Duffy's bowling ball—turns out to have a role in the resolution.
- Contrived Coincidence: Tons, though some of them may be justified by the fact that the film is seemingly set in a very small town.
- Destroy the Evidence: Frank gets rid of his bloodstained shirt by using the burning book to set fire to it, and then dumping it down the sewer. Even this almost gets him caught, as Norma drives by unexpectedly.
- Didn't Think This Through: Pretty much the lynchpin of the film, which is pretty much all about ordinary people panicking their way through crimes. Cheri, who is made out to be something of a cunning sociopath, seems to be the sole exception to this, taking precaution after precaution when trying to set Duffy up for Aaron's death. However, she has a massive lapse in judgment when she reports the robbery, as implicating Duffy in the robbery would give him a plausible alibi for not being present to murder Aaron.
- Downer Ending: At the end, Frank and Norma have lost their daughter Cheri, Buzzy and Duffy are almost certainly going to be recaptured and go to prison, Eddie's penis might or might not be reattached successfully, and he, Mark, Tim and Jack are all in varying degrees of trouble with the law. Nobody really comes out ahead.
- Drunk Driver: Jack is driving drunk when he runs over Aaron's corpse.
- Dull Surprise: Duffy's reaction to the out-of-nowhere question "How about the penis?" To be fair, at this point he's somewhere on the wrong side of the Despair Event Horizon.
- Ensemble Cast: For a small movie, this has quite a cast and crew. In addition to the actors mentioned above, there's Barbara Hershey (the mom from hell in Black Swan), Jason Segel as a paramedic and Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson in The Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) as a very overworked cop. Also, Clint Mansell wrote the score. The director of photography is Shane Hurlburt, who has an extensive filmography but is perhaps best known for being on the receiving end of Christian Bale's tirade during the filming of Terminator Salvation.
- Extremely Short Timespan: It's a full-length movie, but due to being "Rashomon"-Style with a huge cast, the events of forty minutes (from 10:54 to 11:34 PM) covered in Real Time, fills a feature-length film.
- Facial Horror: The corpse of Aaron Lewis.
- Fat Suit: Downplayed. Swayze, still in trim after all these years, wore only a little padding under his shirt to make himself more like a middle-aged everyman.
- Fille Fatale: Cheri. While she's having sex with Aaron in the cemetery, the guy's head gets crushed by the fallen head of an angel statue. After about a minute of shock and horror, she's already come up with a plan on how to make it look as if this accidental death was a murder committed by Cheri's other boyfriend. Cue Cheri's attempt to frame Duffy.
- Gold Digger: Cheri is making two of her boyfriends each pay the full cost of her "abortion." She isn't pregnant.
- Groin Attack: Mike's van crashes while Eddie is peeing out the window. The window slams shut.
- Hyperlink Story: Jack is talking to his girlfriend Cheri at the beginning. He's hit with the (already dead) body of her other boyfriend, Aaron, which was thrown by her father, whose wife attacks Jack because she (mistakenly) thinks he's killed Cheri, who has died in between the phone call and the attack after being hit by the van containing Mark, Tim, and Eddie. Duffy (Cheri's other other boyfriend) is stealing money to pay for Cheri's (fake) abortion, which is why he shoots at Mark, Tim, and Eddie.
- Idiot Ball: Several examples, but the biggest one has to be either Eddie peeing out the window or Buzzy playing with Duffy's gun.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Tim, who runs back to the scene of the accident — from which they just fled after someone shot at them — to retrieve his friend's severed penis.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Mark stops the van in the middle of the road while they're driving Eddie to the hospital in order to coerce him into lying. "You can either say I didn't hit you, or you can bleed to death for all I care! SAY IT!" (No word on how he plans on holding Eddie to this after they get to the hospital.)
- Laser-Guided Karma: A few characters experience this, but most notably Jack. At first, he just seems like a hapless drunk driver whose pathetic attempts at avoiding jail time are almost pitiable. At the the end of the movie (which is also the beginning), we find out Jack was on his way to meet his Dark Mistress, Cheri, who is likely under-age. He's in on her plan to con Duffy and Aaron out of their money, presumably so they can run away together. If the fact that it was Aaron's corpse that landed on his car and got him in trouble wasn't poetic justice, then tripping over Duffy's bowling ball while trying to escape through the cemetery definitely was.
- Look Both Ways: Cheri not only steps into the street with looking, she stops to answer her phone in the middle of the road. Despite the dangerous driving on Mark's part, what happens next is at least partially her fault.
- Mama Bear: Norma (Barbara Hershey)… although her frenzied attack on the man she thinks killed her daughter only serves to delay his capture.
- Not What It Looks Like: Two separate examples that guide part of the plot.
- Frank finds Cheri's keys with Aaron's corpse, and assumes she killed him, resulting in him trying to dispose of the body in a panic.
- Jack is accused of killing Cheri… who coincidentally was struck by a car at the exact same time that Aaron's corpse hit his own car.
- Only a Flesh Wound: Subverted. To disguise the fact that Buzzy was in on the robbery, Duffy shoots her in the arm (at her own request). Trying not to injure her too badly, he pinches the skin of her upper arm into a fold and shoots through the skin (coming very close to blowing off his own fingertip in the process). So Buzzy receives a literal flesh wound… and collapses on the floor in pain.
- Out with a Bang: While Aaron and Cheri are having sex in the cemetery, his head gets crushed by the fallen head of an angel statue that is dislodge when he rocks against a headstone in a fit of passion.
- Pants-Positive Safety: Duffy arrives at Lloyd's with his revolver shoved so deeply down the front of his pants that the handle is barely showing above his waistband. And, yes, it is pointing at his groin. Given everything else that goes wrong with the robbery, it is a miracle that he does not shoot himself in the nuts.
- Papa Wolf: Frank. "I will not see you ruin her life!"
- Potty Emergency: Eddie is desperate to take a leak and decides to piss out the window of Mark's van. This distracts Mark and causes the accident that kills Cheri and severs Eddie's penis.
- Reckless Gun Usage: Duffy and Buzzy are both guilty of this.
- In a failed attempt to intimidate Buzzy, Duffy points a loaded gun directly at her head with his finger on the trigger.
- Buzzy, left alone with the gun, picks it up and starts playing with it like a child. The bullets fall out… and she puts them back in and continues horsing around with the gun, performing a series of action-movie stunts that end in her accidentally putting a bullet through a cooler full of Jolt™ Cola. If anyone had been in the line of fire at the time, this would have happened.
- Revealing Cover-Up: Exaggerated. By the end of the movie, three different people have gone to extremes to conceal, disguise or frame someone else for the death of Aaron Lewis… who died by accident.
- Running Over the Plot: The film starts with Jack Levine running into someone (Aaron's already-dead body) while driving while talking on his cellphone and intoxicated. Due to the film's Anachronic Order, this is also where it ends, but with another person (Cheri) being hit by a different car at the exact same time.
- Stupid Crooks: Nearly every character is committing some kind of crime. And are all hilariously bad at it.
- These Gloves Are Made for Killin': Played With when Fille Fatale Cheri rushes to her home to grab a pair of yellow rubber gloves from the kitchen after Aaron's head was crushed by the head of an angel statue while they were having sex. Cheri intends to cover up the accidental death by framing her boyfriend Duffy while using gloves to cover her prints. Her father does not question why she's getting them.
- Time Title: About two car crashes at the titular time.
- Trailers Always Spoil: If you don't want to learn about the severed penis, or what really happened to Aaron, don't watch the trailer.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Just about every bad thing that happens in the movie is due to the actions and choices of Cheri.
- Unwitting Pawn: Duffy and Aaron and possibly Jack are this to Cheri.
- Wham Line: "Does he know you're not pregnant?"
