TV Review : ‘Against Time’ on USA

What if you could go back in time and assassinate Hitler before he came to power? What if you could go back and kill Oswald before he assassinated Kennedy? What if you could go back and eliminate the CBS executives who canceled “The Twilight Zone”?

These are the sorts of perennial questions that intrigue new generations of time-travel tale spinners. It’s the middle scenario that’s the impetus behind “Running Against Time” (premiering tonight at 9 on cable’s USA Network), a TV movie that itself should be stopped from ever occurring as soon as someone actually invents a time machine.

The “Back to the Future” movies skewered this formula to perfection, managing in the process to deal with the paradoxes of time travel in a way that teased the brains of even hard-core science-fiction buffs. USA’s mindless film, though, is like “Future” played with a completely straight face.