Esperanza

Set in Ecuador, this so-so supernatural thriller from MacGregor (Kill Time) mixes time travel with a centuries' long struggle between good and evil. When two strangers—Tess Livingston, an FBI agent, and Ian Ritter, a Minneapolis journalism professor who looks like George Clooney—are marooned at a remote bus station high in the Andes, they wind up taking a detour to the town of Esperanza, where they attract the unwelcome attention of Dominica, a shape-shifting spirit who can inhabit human bodies. Dominica is stunned to realize that both Tess and Ian are "transitionals," souls of people "nearly dead in the physical world" who pose a threat to her kind, brujos, ghosts unable to move into the afterlife. In a flashback to Minnesota in 1968, Ian emerges from a coma with memories from his future existence and embarks on a half-hearted attempt to prevent some of history's tragedies like Martin Luther King's assassination. Action that often drags and characters few will care about don't help a half-baked premise. (Sept.)