For the most part, January is a cinematic graveyard. Major studios dump their weakest, most derivative movies there so they can be immediately forgotten. If a movie gets bumped from a prime fall release date to January, it’s usually not a good sign. Occasionally, however, a movie will come along with loftier aspirations.
“Predestination,” written and directed by Peter and Michael Spierig, is one of those movies; in fact, its twisty time-travel premise makes it one of the more ambitious January releases in recent years. At the same time, “Predestination” suffers from some glaring storytelling issues and a plot that gets increasingly more silly and messy.
Ethan Hawke plays a Temporal Agent (a time-traveling special agent) who goes back in time to stop crime before it can happen. For his last mission, he must travel back to the ‘70s and stop the Fizzle Bomber, the one criminal who’s evaded him throughout time.
While posing as a bartender, Hawke’s character runs into a young woman (Sarah Snook) who tells him her long, woeful life story: being abandoned by her parents as a baby and having to grow up in an orphanage, not fitting in anywhere, as well as learning that she’s a hermaphrodite.
Not surprisingly, “Predestination” gets more complicated and messy as it goes on, eventually leading to a major twist — involving the identities of our two characters, as well as the identity of the Fizzle Bomber — that’s clever but also pretty ridiculous, to say the least.
With that said, the movie is competently made and acted. Hawke and Snook are both solid, playing characters who haven’t lived fulfilling lives. Hawke’s Temporal Agent is haunted by his inability to catch the Fizzle Bomber after all these years, preventing him from retiring. Hawke continues to show off his ability to play a likable Average Joe, and relative newcomer Snook gives a quietly powerful performance as someone who hasn’t been able to catch a break his/her entire life.
For being a high-concept, time-travel movie “Predestination” feels surprisingly small-scale. While it does create a level of intimacy, the narrative also feels constricted. At times, you get the impression that the movie wants to be as big as its concepts. Outside of Hawke, Snook and Noah Taylor, as the head of the Temporal Agency, there aren’t any other noticeable characters. Overall, the movie could have benefitted from a few more set pieces and characters, to add scale and nuance.
Not only that, “Predestination” gets bogged down by some lazy storytelling devices — namely, the excessive use of flashbacks when Snook’s character recounts his/her life story to Hawke.
All in all, “Predestination” isn’t a great movie, but I commend the Spierig brothers for trying to make a dense and ambitious picture. Sure, it’s kind of a mess, but it’s an interesting movie, nonetheless, which usually isn’t the case with January releases.