Time Is Power
Rating: 4/10
Running Time: 109 minutes
US Certificate: PG-13 UK Certificate: 12A
The world stood in a shocked silence as Justin Timberlake looked like he was beginning to get the hang of this acting lark. Awful movies like The Love Guru, Edison Force and The Open Road were behind him, The Social Network hailed the arrival of a serious actor. And then came Friends With Benefits. And now In Time. Back to square one?
In the tradition of modern sci-fis like Surrogate and Minority Report, In Time creates another ridiculous way for the future to be different. In this future, the ageing gene has been turned off and people stop getting older once they get to twenty-five. The downside however is that they are only designed to live for one more year before dying. Time becomes a currency and rich people are able to buy enough to live forever whilst the poor die at twenty-six. Will Salas comes into a whole lot of money/time but he is accused of murder and goes on the run with a hostage (Seyfried) and is chased by the ‘time keepers’ (Murphy).
For starters, Justin Timberlake and the dystopian future are by far not the worst things about the movie. JT brings charisma and star presence to a pretty generic, one-dimensional character and provides us with someone to care about. The setting is impressively revealed throughout the opening exchanges and the world looks kind of credible with little touches like the characters rushing everywhere and eating quickly to make the most of their time. Then it all goes downhill. The move away from intriguing science fiction to awful action is too much to take and the rest of the film just comes across as laughable, mindless and boring. Add to that a heavy-handed lecture on the evils of wealth and you have a movie that should have gone straight to DVD.
It's Got: Justin Timberlake doing a decent job, a ridiculous-but-good premise ruined, one dimensional characterisation
It Needs: A less heavy-handed message, to not have dispensed with plot and explanations a quarter of the way through, less monotonous action, Leonard from The Big Bang Theory!
Summary
The main advantage of living in this dystopian future where most people die at 25 would be that I would have died before being made to watch this movie. In Time certainly doesn’t live up to it’s potential.