Volition (2019)

Jimmy sees glimpses of the future. Mostly he uses these to grab unattended cigs and place just enough bets to keep the rent paid and the booze flowing. Real low-rent burnout loser energy. When he agrees to help an old friend sell some diamonds for some Zimbabweans (who stole the diamonds from some guys in Angola), it goes from what he initially sees as a simple handoff to a series of events that end with him dying gunshot on a floor.

The broad question is the matter of destiny or free will. If you see what lies ahead, can you change it, or is it preordained? Jimmy takes the outlook that it's the latter, so there's no point fighting what he sees. Until it's his own death, apparently. Jimmy's mother died in a car wreck when he was 7, and his adoptive father worked on a project for a drug which actually allows for time travel, yet somehow your past self is able to see what you experienced. So Jimmy has really just been getting flashes of things his future time-traveling selves experienced his entire life.

(I think that's how it works. There was some particle physics gobbledy-gook I missed while I was getting my laundry.)

Anyway, because Jimmy seems to avert his death, only to watch a nice woman he met that day named Angela die instead, he starts repeatedly taking the drug, trying to jump to different points earlier in that day to save her. In that sense, it's a grimmer version of the 1955 scenes in Back to The Future II, with Jimmy trying to avoid letting his Earlier That Day self see him, while we see the same events play out with new context.

You know those zombie movies where the characters act like they've never seen a zombie movie before? This is like that, but for time travel. Eventually there are 3 Jimmys running around trying to keep Angela alive, and none of them recognize how their actions are feeding into each other. Some of that can be explained by the fact each Jimmy is increasingly injured, and the repeated use of the drug isn't doing their minds any good, but it still seems like Jimmy has to keep choosing the dumbest approaches possible.

Example: On his first attempt, Jimmy outmaneuvers the two goons that are trying to double-cross the boss and swipes the diamonds from the motel safe where Earlier That Day Jimmy hid them. He then runs to his adopted father's house, to ask him to give his past self the diamonds when he arrives shortly. OK, I get he was warned to avoid his Earlier That Day self. So he can't just hand them to that version of himself.

But he must have realized he's the reason why the diamonds weren't in the safe when Earlier That Day Jimmy and Angela returned to the hotel room, and he knows the boss will arrive at Dad's house soon. If you want to return the diamonds, why not just hide near the house until the boss shows, step out, hand them over, and explain how his cousin tried to pull a fast one? Why deliberately involve more people?

The point seems to be to hammer home the idea that things are predestined and it was always going to end this way for Jimmy, creating a sense of futility before the very end of the film. Which could either be an affirmation of how everything is predestined, or a counter that just because you can't see the differences produced by your actions doesn't mean they don't exist.