The Tomorrow Job

A team of thieves use a drug that allows them to trade places with their future-selves in order to steal tomorrow's secrets, and then profit from them today, but then things go awry…

Personally, if ever I hear a movie described as a “Time-traveling heist film” I will immediately become Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction after he’s told that The Wolf will be coming directly: “Well, shit… that’s all you needed to say!” Unfortunately, this time I ended up like Vincent Vega instead… here I sit, all broken-hearted, tried to shit, but only farted.

So to start, you probably need to understand the concept of Schrodinger’s Cat. This is an idea you should probably already understand, as it is mentioned in TV shows and movies almost as much as the explanation of what an EMP is. But for those of you who are still unaware, Schrodinger’s Cat is a paradox postulated by physicist Erwin Schrodinger in which alternate realities exist simultaneously until a choice is made. To illustrate, he suggested (and I am paraphrasing) that you should imagine there’s a cat in a sealed box in which you release some poison gas. The idea is, until we verify the state of the cat with our own eyes, we don’t know if the cat is dead or alive. Thus, the cat exists in two realities at the same time, both alive and dead, at least until you open the box and look inside.

Observation determines reality.

Filmed somewhere that looks like Minnesota, which means that it was probably Canada, The Tomorrow Job is a “CW show” level movie about a group of thieves-for-hire who use a time-travel drug in order to trade places with their one-day-in-the-future selves, so that they can steal secrets and information that their clients can than use to profit on in the past. This upsets some bad guys with guns, and as a result, temporal shenanigans ensue.

The film does make some valiant efforts, including a clever bit of color coding, in order to clearly delineate the film’s intertwining past, present, and future story, so kudos to them on that, but too often it relies on characters explaining the situation to other characters, which does nothing but grind the film’s meager momentum to a halt, and even worse, the explanations aren’t ver good, so it makes an already somewhat murky plot even murkier…

Inception, it is not.

Looper, it is not.

But the really sad part is, the film clearly thinks it is.

At it’s core, the Tomorrow Job is nothing more than the latest example of the all-too-common “too low of budget and too overly ambitious of a plot for the resources it has available to it” genre film. But honestly, even if the film had more money and support, it would still fail due to its overly-worked script that spends way too much energy on trying to explain its needlessly complex central idea.

Big meh.