Directed by Bruce Wemple, The Tomorrow Job (2023) is a sci-fi action thriller that deals with the concept of time travel but with a twist. The protagonist, Lee Warner, is a thief who pulls off heists with the help of his team by using a drug called ‘Z Plus.’ The drug doesn’t physically alter time but enables the user’s consciousness to jump into the body of their future or past self for a limited period of time, allowing one to foresee the future a day in advance or to change past events, sometimes creating time paradoxes and utter confusion within the user’s mind as to what is real. Although it blends together several elements of time travel with elaborate heists and a few action sequences, its concept is not new, with several ideas taken straight out of a Christopher Nolan playbook, creating a complex hodgepodge of inadequately explored concepts. Released in theaters on January 13, the film stars Grant Schumacher, Ariella Mastroianni, Andrew Gombas, Caitlin Duffy, George Katt, Chris Cimperman, William Champion, Rick Montgomery Jr., and Paul Kandarian.
Spoilers Ahead
‘The Tomorrow Job’ Story
The film begins with Lee and his teammates, Martin and Finn, trying to pull off a time heist under the influence of the drug ‘Z Plus’. The drug allows them to transfer their consciousness to their bodies twenty-four hours into the future, but it also changes the color of their pupils, turning them purple if they travel to the future and green if they travel to the past. Hence, they take the drug to test out the various scenarios that can come to be when they attempt to pull off a heist. But during one such heist, while they try to escape from the scene in a stolen car, Martin is captured and killed by a group of armed assailants led by Derrick Volkov, who are later revealed to be agents of the Organization, whose sole purpose is to reproduce the Z Plus drug, which was originally created by the missing scientist, Dr. Jay Tupple. When Lee is approached by the Organization to conduct a new heist, Finn contemplates the risks involved with their activities, especially after the death of Martin, but Lee assures her that it was due to the fact that they were ambushed and it would not happen again if they were careful enough. Thus, they decide to pull off one last heist to retrieve fourteen account numbers from a secure facility, and to help them do that, they recruit a new member, Sophia, to take Martin’s place in their team. Lee gives her the details regarding the drug, and that is when its effects are truly explained. He tells her that once she takes the pill, she would have the choice to either jump forwards in time or backward, which would change the color of her pupils, and that the drug used to be previously available in the form of a serum called ‘Z,’ which was much more dangerous and unpredictable.
The team is faced with the task of jumping into the next day and apprehending an email message from Simon Willoughby’s laptop to retrieve the account numbers, but as they start executing their plan, they are again intercepted by the armed assailants, who attempt to kill Simon, but Lee saves him just in time. Simon is somewhat of a computer genius who, after being rescued by Lee and his team, joins forces with them. When they return to the present, they do not find themselves inside Finn’s van, which was the plan, but they wake up in Lee’s cottage. Lee discovers that the Z-Pills are missing from his room, and they assume that something must have gone wrong with their past selves when they were in the future.
‘The Tomorrow Job’ Ending
As Lee tries to devise a plan to get the Z-pills back, he is attacked by an agent of the Organization, who injects him with a consciousness-communication device, which is basically a microchip that allows him to telepathically communicate with someone else like a radio signal. To his surprise, the man known as the organizer was behind the attack, and it was orchestrated in order to scare him into doing their dirty work. After meeting face-to-face with the governor of the Organization, Lee understands that he had to act fast to retrieve the Z-pills before they were stolen by the assailants. Hence, the team travels back a day in time to hide the pills inside an air vent, where they would be safe. But as they do, Derrick and his team of agents arrive with a hostage. Derrick reveals that he hadn’t, in fact, killed Martin before but had taken him hostage, and he would be forced to kill him now if Lee did not hand over the pills. After Lee gives him the drug, he leaves Martin behind and drives away, and once again, Martin joins the team. He reveals that Derrick was a Russian mobster, and his purpose was to retrieve the last supply of Z Plus created by Dr. Tupple under the orders of the Organization. Running out of options, Lee decides to pay a visit to an old friend, and the team drives to the secret hideout of Dr. Jay Tupple to convince him to manufacture a new batch of Z Plus for them. But Jay admits that he stopped producing the drug because of the effects it had on its users, driving them to the verge of death or, worse, insanity.
The next morning, Derrick and his team again showed up to apprehend Jay, who had been hiding from the Organization for years. Martin turns out to be a double agent who had been working with Derrick, and his whole hostage situation was orchestrated to force Lee to lead them to Jay’s location. Being an experienced man of knowledge, Jay knew that he could not escape such a situation if it presented itself, so he ingested a fatal dose of muscle relaxers to deter the assailants. He offers Derrick a deal: to leave Lee and his team alone in exchange for the location of the antidote that would help him bring Jay to the organizer alive. Enraged, Derrick shoots Lee in the chest and takes Jay prisoner, forcing him to lead him to the antidote. Once at the location, Jay masterfully traps Derrick in his trap, as Lee heroically appears in the disguise of an agent and shoots Derrick with a tranquilizer. It turns out that Finn, Sophia, and Lee had suspected that Martin could be a double agent and had devised an elaborate escape plan in case Derrick had shown up to capture Jay. The film ends with the team of Lee, Sophia, Simon, and Finn gathering on a boat to celebrate their victory over the Organization as they sail off into the sunset.