Review: 'Predestination' starring Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook

There are plenty of reasons to like Ethan Hawke, but his choosiness in the films he stars in is not one of them. He's a lot like Forest Whitaker, really; both are generally good for one excellent performance in a well-regarded movie per year. The rest is surrounded by absolute crap that Nicolas Cage might scoff at. In Hawke's case, we've seen him star in two acclaimed movies of the last couple of years: Before Midnight and Boyhood, the latter possibly earning him some awards hardware. But he's also been in too many clunkers to count (hello Getaway!). His latest film, the time twisting sci-fi film Predestination isn't quite one of Hawke's worst duds, but it wastes a wonderfully loopy premise by getting lost in all the swerves.

The film starts off promisingly cool, with a slickly presented showdown between an unknown bomber and the agent sent to stop him. Both men have their faces hidden in shadow, which combined with the movie's title is probably enough to give away the ultimate payoff. When the agent fails to stop the bomb and it goes off in his face, he uses a time travel device hidden in a violin case, to jump a few years into the future. There his face is completely reconstructed by his employers, a temporal agency charged with preventing disasters throughout history. The agent's task has been to stop the unfortunately-named Fizzle Bomber, and has been traveling up and down the timestream trying to do just that. The effects can be pretty lousy on the brain; a point which we know will come into play later.

So it's a sweet setup with a ton of potential, but as soon as it gets going the story takes an odd narrative turn. The agent (now played by Hawke) goes back in time and sets up shop as a Manhattan bartender. His night is disrupted by an odd patron named John who calls himself the Unmarried Woman who begins a story about his incredible life. At first it's hard to figure what's up, but then it becomes clear that this man is actually a woman (Sarah Snook), and she begins a dragging, overlong story about how she was a brilliant student who became involved with some space program, had a child with a mysterious stranger, had a forced sex change, and somewhere in there became a writer of confessional rags. While some of this would be entertaining in small doses, it seems to go on forever until you begin to wonder if it's even the same movie. During all of this time, Hawke is basically there just sitting in silence. It's not an exaggeration to say this goes on for about 40 minutes, nearly to the end of the 90-minute film.

It's hard to go much further without giving something away, but Predestination is basically one complicated jigsaw puzzle, made more complicated because some of the pieces don't exactly fit. Robert Heimlein's 1958 short story served as the source material, and it sets up the story with a minimum of baggage that writers/directors the Spierig Brothers pile on into one giant paradox. There's a mystery behind absolutely everything and much of it isn't worth the trouble. Who is the Fizzle Bomber? Who is the bartender, really? What's the significance of John becoming Joan? Why is this secret agency of time cops interested in all of this? How is it all connected? As the jukebox plays Lonzo and Oscar's 1947 goof song "I'm My Own Grandpa", the answers become pretty obvious.

Despite the big reveal being telegraphed from a couple of light years away, Predestination still manages to botch the execution in other ways. Snook's multi-faceted, dual-gendered performance is truly a revelation. She goes from a feisty and striking redhead to an introverted, barely-recognizable man with the weight of a sad past on his shoulders. It's unfortunate that so much of her character's story doesn't jibe with the sci-fi elements that take over later on. As for Hawke, he's perfectly suited to the role of a man who has felt the incredible toll of time travel. He deserves a better film than the Spierig's give him here, and since they also directed him in the terrible vampire flick Daybreakers it's the second time they've let him down. "Fool me once, shame on you...."

 Rating: 2 out of 5