Here we have a Bonnie & Clyde meets Robin Hood tale that manages to sprinkle in a little of Sly Stallone’s Over the Top on its downward spiral to sci-fi nothingness. It was evident from the start that writer/director Andrew Niccol’s In Time was going to be a rough outing as Justin Timberlake did his best Will Smith impersonation and we were supposed to immediately buy in to the film’s premise, even though it never attempts to convince us of its legitimacy, as plot holes get wider and wider in nearly every scene. However, I was still giving the film a chance over 60 minutes in, convincing myself it wasn’t that bad until it all became too unbearable as the repeated ticking clock scenarios caused more harm than good.
The story goes like this, in the late 21st century people are no longer using money for currency, they are using time. When, why and how this happened isn’t really clear, but we do know humans have been genetically altered so that when they reach their 25th birthday a ticking clock emblazoned on their forearm begins counting down the final year of their lives, that is, unless they can obtain more time. Adopting the “rich get richer and the poor get poorer” motto, In Time is a thinly veiled political metaphor that beats you over the head with what it believes to be cleverness, but instead is an onslaught of obviousness.
The story centers on ghetto-born Will Salas (Timberlake). He and his mother (Olivia Wilde) have been scratching away for years in an attempt to go on living. We learn at the outset that Will’s mother has just turned 50 years old and has essentially been living the last 25 years of her life, quite literally, one day at a time. The fact she still looks like Olivia Wilde is evidence of just one of this fictional world’s blessings… you never age. Good thing, because such a scenario would turn even the most beautiful of people into haggard shrews if they had to scratch and claw for pennies a day. Note how I wrote “day,” not “weeks” or “months”… day… Olivia Wilde’s character has been working for roughly the last 9,125 days just so she can live the next! Workin’ for a livin’ never meant so much, and speaking of working and living…
On his way to work, Will walks over dead people on a daily basis. Unsanitary as it may be, the reaction to a dead body on the side of the road is, “Awww, another one ran out of time.” Yup, no love lost in the ghetto, just another meat sack dead on the ground. It’s rough to say the least.
As luck would have it, things may be looking up for Will. A trip to the local bar forces a run in with a 105-year-old man who looks like he just stepped out of Hugo Boss ad, but is tired of living and decides to pass on a century of time to Will before killing himself. As great as this may seem, Will is then accused of murdering the man by people called timekeepers (essentially this world’s version of police) forcing him to go on the run. First stop, the not so ironically named New Greenwich, the richest time zone in the country where it’s time to dole out a little payback.
As for getting back at the man, Will’s idea is to go all Robin Hood on the muckety-mucks in New Greenwich, stealing time and giving it to the poor while kidnapping a corporate big wig’s daughter (Amanda Seyfried) only to ultimately fall in love with her (obviously). Next step (even more obvious), they’ll play a little strip poker, drive really fast (in reverse at times) and rob a time bank by driving an armored car through the front window (I guess no one else ever thought of this brilliant idea, but it sure does look easy).
Adding to the intensity we’ll hear such clever dialogue as Time is money… I don’t have the time… Follow the time… Don’t waste my time… and the most heartbreaking of all, “Just once I’d like to wake up with more time on my hand than hours in the day.” See, that last one is clever because the time is actually on their hands, well, arm, but you get the point… it’s witty.
As all of this plays out we’re continually bombarded with heavy-handed words to live by from “the poor die and the rich don’t live” and “people are not meant to live forever.” That last one really stuck with me, because the people in this movie actually are meant to live forever. The film’s tagline is “Live forever or die trying,” which is all these poor shmucks are trying to do. Problem is, all the rich people keep hording the time.
One guy actually keeps his “first million” (years that is) in a giant vault, an idea that made me want to punch someone in the face for believing one million years is somehow comparable to one million dollars. The comparison here just doesn’t work, time may be money, but the fact this film is trying to sell us on the idea there wouldn’t be mass chaos as a result of this kind of scenario is terribly short-sighted thinking. In one scene someone wants to ride a bus, they are told it’s going to cost two hours, they only have 90 minutes left on their life clock, bus driver tells ’em “too bad” and bails. At what point do you stop being nice and just go postal in a world like this? Only 90 minutes left? Why not kill the bus driver and now you’re driving the bus?
I know you’re curious about the acting so I’ll tell you it’s not fair to really judge anyone, though “Mad Men” star Vincent Kartheiser is so over the top as the film’s smarmy villain it’s almost sickening each time he’s on screen and Alex Pettyfer (I Am Number Four) is yet again embarrassing himself as he has clearly been typecast into supporting villain roles for the rest of his career and failing to do even that. I won’t lay too much judgment on Timberlake or Seyfried as they weren’t working with the best of material and Cillian Murphy, playing the film’s supercop, gets a pass because he too was working with second rate material and doing the best he could with it.
What’s most frustrating is that I really like the idea behind this film, which is one of the big reasons I’m so bothered. It’s almost as if Niccol didn’t put any thought into trying to make logical sense out of the story he was telling. He just came up with the idea that money has been replaced with time and that was about where the thought process ended, without setting up any rules to govern the world he was creating.
Niccol should have taken a cue from Source Code, a film I could imagine someone having problems with for any myriad of reasons, but most of them are dependent on the direction the story went, not on the fundamental execution of that story and the logic it was creating. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan didn’t take a break for a backseat make out session or a game of strip poker, there wasn’t any time. Ironically enough, despite having more “race against the clock” moments than any movie I can remember, In Time has plenty of time to waste on needless story filler rather than exploring the idea it created. Too bad.
