Review of the film “Heist from the Future” by Bruce Wample

At the box office – “The Tomorrow Job” by Bruce Wample, not the first and, alas, not the last film about careless time travel. Looking at it is not without easy pleasure, Mikhail Trofimenkov nevertheless, he decided that it would be nice to cover up this subgenre of fantastic cinema for a while, and force the scriptwriters to listen to a course of logic.

There is an impeccable test of how to distinguish a person who really understands something, say, in quantum mechanics, from a charlatan. If, in response to your question about a certain scientific phenomenon, he starts pushing the story of Schrödinger’s cat, everything is clear with him: this paradox has long become a phenomenon of mass culture, supposedly explaining everything, but in fact explaining nothing.

So in “Robbery from the Future” from time to time one of the characters, obviously trying to understand the logic of the scriptwriter-director, asks elementary questions. Type: and we, in general, now when: yesterday, today or tomorrow? Or: are you, in general, alive, or were you already killed yesterday, today, tomorrow? Or even simpler: why were we blindfolded, or what kind of pill did we just gobble up? And there is certainly a smart person who will ask in response: have you, finally, heard about Schrödinger’s cat? Oh, you haven’t heard, so I’ll tell you now. And tells. And the curious nod their heads obediently. Now everything is clear. We are yesterday, today and tomorrow at the same time. Both alive and dead at the same time. Well, then it’s all right.

Obviously, “Robbery from the Future” should be registered under the cyberpunk department. “There is no future” in the sense that the surrounding reality corresponds to today, despite the fact that some incredible science fiction phenomena have already been introduced into it.

The suburbs of New York are invariably red-brick, romantic losers light up “blunts” in the invariable trailers that serve them as a motor home. Corrupt middle-class managers splash around in the invariable jacuzzis in their mansion’s shabby gardens and take self-improvement courses. But at the same time, some Z-vaccine and its modified version, purple Z+ capsules, are actively circulating in the underground circulation, allowing you to travel to the future. True, for some reason only tomorrow and only for one hour.

The first trials of the Z, carried out on live “rabbits” by a good-natured and gray-bearded genius, did not go too well. People seemed to dissolve in parallel realities, but then things went smoothly. And now orders for penetration into tomorrow, in order to steal commercial information from there, vital for serious people from today, are being put on a business basis.

The robbery team consists of operative Lee (Grant Schumacher), coordinator Finn (Caitlin Duffy), and a mnemonic. That is, a person with a photographic memory: Martin (Andrew Gombas), and after his virtual death – Sofia (Ariella Mastroianni). All of them correspond to the stereotype of young, moderately attractive and self-confident gouges, who at some point took a bite of a piece of the pie that was too fat for them.

And now the inevitable Russian mafia, led by a laughing executioner, some killers in helmets reminiscent of Star Wars stormtroopers, and a blond beast, known under the pseudonym Organizer and communicating with victims through a neural network, are breathing down their necks.

Everything would be fine, and in some places it’s even quite funny, if you don’t ask questions about the logic of what is happening. In addition to Schrödinger’s cat, the characters will inevitably recall at some point the “butterfly effect” from Ray Bradbury’s story. Why on earth: Bradbury talked about the taboo on changing the past, and the hacks from The Robbery change the future. What the hell does the wise phrase mean that in the course of the leap into tomorrow, “the mind travels, but the body stays here,” if just in the future the body may even crash?

Why do those who go from today to tomorrow turn purple eyes, while those of their counterparts who remain in today turn green? Moreover, this design find is used on the screen from time to time, as if the director forgets about it, then remembers it. Why are the heroes blindfolded before the transition, for some reason, without fail in the interior of a certain van?

And this is only an insignificant part of the questions that could be asked to the authors. By and large, they themselves do not understand anything about what they have composed. And the more they try to explain themselves, the more hopelessly they get confused in the labyrinths of their own fantasy. So the audience can only be advised to relax and try to enjoy the classic plot “a thief stole a baton from a thief.” And to take the only moral from the film: never put any purple stuff in your mouth.