In “Volition,” an action/science fiction hybrid, Adrian Glynn McMorran plays a guy who can see into the future. “Precognition,” he calls it. It’s too bad McMorran couldn’t tap into those same powers of prophecy to save himself from taking this messy role.
When the story begins, James (McMorran) is sorting out a series of future events that pop into his head. He imagines his scruffy landlord badgering him for rent…a woman… a couple of old friends…diamonds… a gunshot. Before you know it, the landlord is banging on his door in real life. But James, a magnet for failure and trouble, doesn’t have the money. That should serve as motivation. Yet it’s just an excuse for him to get out of the house and to a bar, where he can then stumble upon a woman in need of saving. The same woman from his vision, maybe?
Writer-director Tony Dean Smith opts for a contemplative, high-minded tone for the promising premise—think scientist Eric Wargo meets B-movie action. That is already a confusing approach, to be sure, but jumbled timelines and expository dialogue blur an already murky narrative, leading to a number of twists that stumble instead of surprise. Once James saves Angela (Magda Apanowicz) from a back-alley rape, he quickly realizes that his visions are leading to his own death.
Soon, a couple of old friends pull up on James and Angela in a muscle car. The boss, Ray (John Cassini), offers James a job moving diamonds, and his lack of rent money entices him to take it. It also means James must wrestle with his fate. “This lousy life has played out before,” he tells Angela. “And I’m stuck watching reruns.” He knows the diamonds lead nowhere good but, dammit, fate is fate. You see, James is the kind of troubled, hair-over-the-eyes hero who, given the chance to leave town and dodge death for good, stays because “free will doesn’t exist.” He gets what’s coming to him in the form of action cliches.
There’s a been there, done that feel to the film. This isn’t a criticism of McMorran, who plays James with grave seriousness, but everything he says and everything he does has been said and done before in other movies. In his attempt to remember the future, James writes stuff down on his living room wall, a riff on Guy Pearce’s tattoos in “Memento.” Ray’s mobster dialogue is cutting room floor Scorsese (“Check out this fruit loop!” he postures). The narrative structure recalls “Next.” The timeline slips back and forth between James and Angela on the run and a future where James takes a bullet to the chest. Is that a dream or really the future?
At the midway point, Smith throws in a time-travel twist, turning the film into a thriller of sorts. But any potential for time-hopping fun is buried under scientific jargon. The dialogue goes a bit like, “Something, something, Einstein, something, something, Rosenthal…clairvoyance… space-time continuum.” Huh?
As confused as its hero and as baffling as its science, “Volition” suffers from too-muchness. There’s more twists, flashbacks, narrative countermoves, and nauseating camera motion than anyone can take in a single viewing. When H.G. Wells popularized time travel in “The Time Machine,” he spent a great deal of time simplifying the science for everyday people to understand. The result was a mind-bending adventure that everyone, from ages 9 to 99, could read. If only Smith could learn and follow suit. [C-]
“Volition” is available now in select theaters and VOD.