Producers: Sarah Bauer, Katie Harkins, Gaspare Interrante, Will Martinko and Matthew Santangelo   Director: Will Martinko   Screenplay: Will Martinko and Tony McCall   Cast: John Brocagh Lynn, Reese Grove, Jelena Uchev, Aidan Everly, J. Emmett O’Hare, Miranda Griffin, Colin Tyrell, Mae Burrus and Marusia Griffin Lynn   Distributor: Breaking Glass Pictures

Grade: D

One might like to be kind to movies made by folks dipping into feature filmmaking for the first time and working on miniscule budgets, but too often things turn out badly.  That’s the case with this scrappy debut from Will Martinko, who’s toiled away on shorts for years.  The script for “Inertia” is built around Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion, but it’s his law of gravity that’s really determinative here: the movie crashes to earth with a resounding thud.

The script by Martinko and Tony McCall is a variant on the old sci-fi principle that time travelers must avoid meeting versions of themselves along the way, lest something terrible should result.  In this case, however, the problem is a boy, Roman (John Brocagh Lynn), who’s the offspring of a man from the future and a woman of the present. 

The father is Dmitri (Aidan Everly), a Russian time-traveler who’s also a hit-man.  After a job in the “now” he meets Meriya (Jelena Uchev) and they enjoy a night together before he departs for his own time.  Nine months later she gives birth to Roman, though the event has some major consequences.

Fourteen years later Roman (John Brocagh Lynn) has developed telekinetic powers that he uses to purloin clothes from a thrift shop where Lennon (Reese Grove) is clerking.  The sheltered lad is taken with her and returns to the shop.  They quickly develop a connection and spend time together talking of their dreams and hopes.  In one interlude they take over the loft of a church, where he plays the organ while she sings.  They’re discovered and forced to flee.

Lennon is at odds with her mother, and persuades Roman to help her steal her car and run off together.  But tragedy intervenes: in a crash Lennon dies, and when Roman uses his powers to revive her, Dmitri, who’s returned to see Meriya, is horrified.  The car implodes in a chintzy special effect, and Dmitri explains that his doing so has ripped a hole in the fabric of time and space that threatens to destroy the universe.  Roman, while angry over the situation his parents have placed him in, is intent on finding a way to save the world; the experience has encouraged him to grow up fast.  It must be admitted, though, that his solution avoids any serious explanation.

Much of the cast is weak—both Uchev and Everly are at best tolerable—but Lynn and Grove make a pleasant young couple.  All are hobbled, though, by dialogue that rambles and should have gone through another draft or two.  And the picture suffers from effects that are less than special.  Dmitri explains how Roman’s impetuous act will shatter the cosmos, for instance, by poking a knife through a napkin and then ripping it apart.  Technically, moreover, the movie is quite ragged, with Katie Hawkins’ cinematography scruffy and Martinko’s editing haphazard.

One can explain away the faults of “Inertia” as the result of its meagre budget.  But that doesn’t excuse the incoherence of the script and the mediocre execution.