Die Another Day: "Volition" an impressively knotty sci-fi thriller as clever as it needs to be

Volition (2020)

92 min.

Release Date: July 10, 2020 (Apple TV, Prime Video & Digital)

An existential genre piece that questions if free will exists or if our fates are preordained, “Volition” has pretty heady ambitions for such a polished low-budget production. Writer-director Tony Dean Smith and co-writing brother Ryan W. Smith fashion a crime thriller with a sci-fi spin, using time loops and paradoxes of every film dealing in time-travel to concoct a propulsive, tightly told yarn with an emotional center. Often growing too knotty for its own good, “Volition” is still mighty impressive, rewarding those who can keep up with the narrative’s quantum entanglements.

Ever since he was a child and couldn’t prevent a car accident that made him a foster child, scruffy thirtysomething James Odin (Adrian Glynn McMorran) is alternately blessed and cursed with clairvoyance. Skating through life, living above an auto shop and always lagging on rent, James is able to use his precognitive ability to elude the feds for petty crimes like delivering $10 million in diamonds for mobster Ray (John Cassini). Around the same time, he steps in to save a transient stranger named Angela (Magda Apanowicz) from being assaulted in an alley and the two of them begin spending time together. Of course, when James sees his imminent murder fixed up by two blackmailing goons (Frank Cassini, Aleks Paunovic), he hightails it with Angela. In an effort to alter his fate, James needs the aid of mentoring professor Elliot (Bill Marchant, sometimes distractingly looking like Nick Offerman), who possesses a serum.

“Volition” is engrossing to see how all the dots will connect, smoothly edited without ever leaving its audience in the dust. Adrian Glynn McMorran (TV’s “Arrow”) brings a lived-in suffering to James, a would-be noir anti-hero who waxes philosophical about life being all by design and never random in a self-serious voice-over narration bookending the film. Magda Apanowicz (2015’s “The Green Inferno”) has an appealing edge that makes Angela a little more than a damsel in distress, and yet her underwritten character still ultimately stands more as a device. It’s a surprise the Smith brothers keep the proceedings as lean and pacey as they do, considering they graft on some time-travel to the clairvoyance hook. Less is always more, and the Smith brothers certainly try to do more, but “Volition” is still just as clever as it needs to be.

Grade: B -