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“God and the Devil are the same.” So says the crime boss “Buddha,” portrayed by Willem Dafoe, in an unintentionally hilarious moment, given that Dafoe has played them both. David Jacobson’s Tomorrow You’re Gone shows some of the flair of his earlier efforts (Dahmer, Down in the Valley) but otherwise spends nearly 90 minutes foreshadowing an ending that never materializes. It’s almost as if Jacobson and writer Matthew F. Jones changed their minds at the last minute, leaving us all in the lurch. Nothing about Charlie Rankin’s (Stephen Dorff) life seems rooted in reality — not his release from jail, not the orders he receives from Buddha to murder a witness, and not his chance encounter with Florence (Michelle Monaghan), the hooker with boots of gold. At least, we assume she’s a hooker because she strikes up a conversation on the bus with an ex-con who looks like Stephen Dorff. Charlie is the Bizarro Jack Reacher, buying disposable clothes and staying in flophouses, only he commits crimes instead of solving them. But what begins as a moderately interesting thriller in the vein of Blue Velvet and Angel Heart ends up less than the sum of its portentous parts. For all of Charlie’s hallucinations, the Biblical sobriquet he chooses for his alias (Samson), the studious application of the color red, and the dead goat, it’s a real letdown when the movie just sort of ends without going full-on infernal.
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