Mark Reviews Movies: VOLITION

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 9, 2020

Volition starts in the right direction, with an admirable approach to its central gimmick. Here is the story of a man who sees flashes of the future, and director Tony Dean Smith and his brother Ryan W. Smith's screenplay simply treats that as a given fact.

There is no need to question it. There is no explanation as to the origins of this gift/curse. The "rules" come as the plot unfolds, and the plot itself is established as a simple crime tale.

James (Adrian Glynn McMorran), the clairvoyant man, has to discover thorough his visions how his criminal boss' illegal diamonds will be sold. Then, he has to make it happen.

This early part of the story plays quite well, because the Smiths simply put these straightforward pieces into place and watch them collide. James encounters a mysterious woman named Angela (Magda Apanowicz), whom he's fated to save from an attack. Two of the boss' goons have a plan to double-cross the big guy. James foresees the result of their scheming—his death.

That sends him and his new partner on the run. Eventually, James returns to visit Elliot (Bill Marchant), a professor in quantum physics, who raised James and helped him understand his ability. That, unfortunately, is when the screenwriters decide to blow up their simple, clever gimmick for a much more ambitious and fatally convoluted one.

The easiest way to explain the remainder of the plot is that it becomes about time travel, as James tries to stop someone from being killed. This is such a grave error, as the story becomes founded on an extended act of explanation. As James returns to different times in the past, the professor dumps a lot of expository nonsense, and then James proceeds to affect the past in ways that might prevent the inevitable.

On a level beyond just how unnecessarily elaborate this new narrative path becomes, the screenplay unintentionally writes itself into two different corners. First, because of all the explanations, we catch on to the Smiths' end game pretty quickly (They seem to pull one last, ironic trick but lose the courage to see it through).

Second, the plotting of Volition isn't nearly as logically tidy as the filmmakers seem to believe. The result is frustrating, not only because of the obvious contradictions, but also because keeping it simple was working so well.

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