Movies involving precognition or time-travelling are a complicated lot. Some people really dig them, while others will sit there and pick apart every little detail it does right or, more typically, wrong. When you look back to films like Looper or Predestination (or even something sillier like Happy Death Day 2U), you see films that try to dazzle you with surprises and twisty, mind-bending narratives that probably don’t really hold up to scrutiny. But it’s the feeling they give you while you’re watching it that can entertain and shock...as long as you’re not trying to figure out how the future and the present can not paradoxically commingle.

All this to say your enjoyment of Volition rests on your ability to just go along for the ride because it’s a wild story that, even if you invariably figure out where it’s heading, still manages to pack a punch.

James (Adrian Glynn McMorran) is a scruffy live-by-the-seat-of-your pants crook who wants to be better but can’t. Like he literally feels like he isn’t able to, because he has a gift of clairvoyance. He sees snippets of future events, sometimes right around the corner, sometimes years in the future. He lives his life in a sort of deja vu and when he has visions, he scribbles them down on his wall like a mix of that Always Sunny episode and Memento.

Unfortunately for James, his landlord has given him until the end of the day to come up with the $500 he owes in rent or he’s out on his ass. Somewhat more unfortunately, his just-out-of-prison pal Sal (Frank Cassini) shows up with new friend Terry (Aleks Paunovic), a menacing mountain of a man Sal met in jail, to bring James to crime boss Ray (John Cassini). Ray has $10 million in diamonds from African he wants to sell, but, in Ray’s eloquent words, the FBI is far up his ass they’re coming out of his mouth.

He wants James to “do that thing you do in that head of yours” and figure out when and where he can trade the diamonds without getting caught. James takes the diamonds home with him to do his head thing, under the unlikely protection of Sal and Terry. Along the way, he rescues a transient woman named Angela (Magda Apanowicz), who whos up at his apartment to thank him with a six pack. And it’s at this moment that James sees his future: two people are on their way to steal the diamonds and, more worryingly, he sees his death at the end of a bullet.

With no time to lose, James and Angela end up on the run as James tries to figure out how to stop a future he knows is going to happen, no matter what he does.

This is only the beginning of director Tony Dean Smith’s Volition and at about forty minutes in, the script by Tony and his brother Ryan W. Smith adds a wrinkle of time-travel to the mix. I’d say that’s a spoiler but it’s really not because it only gets more complicated from there in the way a twisty time-travel thriller should be. It also is the story beat that the entire film hangs on because it becomes a question of whether free will exists.

You see, James’ understanding of life and the future is that it’s immutable. When he was a young kid, he saw his mother’s car accident two months before it happened. He drew it, he knew it was going to happen, even if he didn’t quite understand it and was helpless to prevent his mother’s death. At a young age, he quickly learned that “our choices don’t matter. Life happens beyond our control.” That’s a heavy sentiment to levy on a kid and it informs all of his choices in life because, if he sees it, he knows it’s going to come true, regardless of his choice in the matter. So it led him down a seedy path in life that his foster father Elliot (Bill Merchant) desperately wishes he would change. It’s the element of time travel that makes James’ story more interesting because what if he’s wrong and the future can be changed?

Fans of time travel films will no doubt see the twists and turns a mile away but honestly being a step or two ahead of (most) of the story didn’t bother me for once because the actors are so interesting. Let’s be honest, the characters themselves are thinly drawn. We barely have any backstory or understanding of any of the characters, outside of James. And even his story is miniscule. We know virtually nothing about his insta-love Angela or the complicated relationship between James and his foster father.

And yet the characters are intriguing, mostly due to the actors really giving their all to the meager material. I surprisingly found myself so caught up in James’ struggle to avert catastrophe that even when I knew where the time travel plot twists would take us, I didn’t care. There’s a human element to the story that drew me in and I absolutely loved the gritty crime thriller elements mixed in with the more science-fiction genre additions. At a lean 91 minutes, it’s densely packed with complications and twists that you won’t even pause to consider how ludicrous it all is.

Ultimately I wanted the narrative to disprove James’ conceit that “choices don’t matter” as much as I wanted him to change the future. If you allow yourself to take that blind leap of faith and suspend your disbelief, Volition will win you over as a sci-fi crime thriller about a criminal who wants to be better, even though he knows he can’t.

Volition is now available on Apple TV, Prime Video and other Digital Platforms.