IN TIME – The Review

IN TIME is cheesy slice of sci-fi nonsense presenting a futuristic world where time has become the ultimate currency. The natural aging process ends at 25, then you’re genetically-engineered to live for only one more year. After that, you’re dead unless you can acquire more time. Everyone has a countdown clock on his or her arm (it looks like a glowing death camp tattoo) that must be replenished before it gets to zero and your number’s up. Time is used to pay for things. A phone call costs a minute, while ten minutes with a hooker will set you back a whole hour. The wealthy live in upscale ‘time zones’ and control the time supply, relishing in decades and becoming functionally immortal, while the rest of society has to beg, borrow or steal enough hours to make it through the day. Time can be transferred (or stolen) from person to person just by joining arms (the receiver has to have their arm on top) or time can be stored in small metallic blocks that swipe across the wrist. Factory worker Will Salas (Justin Timberlake), lucks out when a suicidal rich guy unloads more than a century on him before intentionally ‘timing out’. Will plans to use the money/time to take his mother, played by Olivia Wylde (all of the characters in the film are 25 years old! Pay attention!) on a vacation but her clock runs out before he can transfer to her some of his newfound fortune. Blamed for the wealthy man’s death and pursued by a determined officer known as a ‘timekeeper’ (Cillian Murphy), Will crashes the upscale world of the immortal elite and abducts Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), the socialite daughter of baby-faced ‘time baron’ Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser) who has a safe with a million years in it. The two go on the run, fall in love, and become Robin Hood-style outlaws, stealing time from the rich to give to the poor.

A fairly complex and clever premise is presented in IN TIME but take away the sci-fi elements and social commentary and it’s a pretty standard lovers-on-the-run story. Like his similar hi-concept/lo-tech films GATTACA and S1MONE, writer/director Andrew Niccol’s new film is so bloated with dull dialog and explanations of its concepts that it forgets to deliver the requisite amount of thrills. IN TIME benefits from decent momentum and is competently directed, but it’s done in by is its own seriousness, a tendency to meander, and a startling lack of special effects. It’s such a silly concept that I wish the execution would have been less somber and more satiric. Since some characters talk about being over a hundred years old, the setting would have to be at least a century off yet this world of the future looks suspiciously like contemporary California. I would have preferred the delirious world of jumpsuits, psychedelic effects, and enormous Epcot Center-like sets from the similarly plotted LOGAN’S RUN to the lifeless backdrop of IN TIME. Since no real effort is made to make the setting physically futuristic perhaps IN TIME is supposed to take place in some alternate universe but the most obvious way to appreciate IN TIME is as a ham-handed parable about income disparity and redistribution of wealth. It becomes quickly clear from the cluttered allegorical landscape that what Niccol is aiming for is a critique of that dastardly ‘richest 1%’ we keep hearing about. It’s this interpretation that makes the most sense, and the one that explains the considerable degree of earnestness he musters in telling his story. Problem is, it’s too solemn and too reliant on generic characters and schematic plot devices. And it’s not much fun. It also leaves way too many questions unanswered. How, when and why did society decide to stop the aging process? And to what end? Why doesn’t Sylvia remove her high heels when she’s spending half the movie being chased? Who’s in charge? The rich seem to spend their time gambling and playing dress-up while the poor spend all day desperately trying to get their wrists scanned for more time or ‘fighting’, a type of arm wrestling that they ‘play to zero’. The jury’s still out on Justin Timberlake as an action star. He’s a decent enough actor but exudes about as much badassery as my cat. But he’s Oscar material next to Amanda Seyfried who delivers her lines as if she’s about to doze off and is given an awkward face-framing Louise Brooks hairdo that just makes her buggy eyes look buggier. Olivia Wylde is fine but her role is too brief to make much of an impression so only the relentlessly spooky Cillian Murphy manages to rise above the material. IN TIME begins with a whimper of interest as a cool-hued fable but loses its way and ends up mostly a waste of….oh, never mind.

2 of 5 Stars