Writer/director Andrew Niccol’s plodding Logan’s Run-meets-Bonnie and Clyde pastiche takes its vacuous emoting and C-grade plotting very seriously, but the whole thing ultimately becomes nothing more than a dumbed down, tarted-up riff on his earlier film Gattaca (1997).
Drawing from an okay sci-fi premise, In Time is set in a near-future/alternate-reality defined by slick retro-stylings and populated by people who talk in stupid sound grabs. In this world, time is money, but also much more. On our wrists are time-coded displays (how they get there is never fully explained) that indicate the minutes we have left to live; everything from a cup of coffee (4 minutes) to a bus ride (2 hours) to a sports car (59 years) is deducted from your life span. The overseers of this world are the greedy folks who rort the system and live for centuries yet appear to be only 25 years old. (Why their bodies don’t age...again, is never fully explained.) Niccol strives to build a metaphorical bridge between these immoral leeches and the real-world corporate hoods that brought about the GFC, but the device manages to be all-at-once blazingly obvious, thoroughly underdeveloped and clumsily overplayed.
Striving to rise above it all is bad-boy-made-good Will (a miscast Justin Timberlake), a blue-collar dude who inherits a century’s worth of time credits from idiot rich-guy existentialist, Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer). Though Bomer tries hard, his preposterous character goes from boasting about his time-stash in a seedy bar in order to score a threesome, to offering his life to Will, after just one blokey bonding moment. It’s not the first, and certainly not the last, instance of the ridiculous storyline trying to shoehorn in some manufactured logic.
As one does when flushed with currency, Will heads uptown, ultimately infiltrating 'New Greenwich’, the home of the ultra-wealthy and ruled by time tycoon, Phillipe Weis (Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser, awful). Soon, Will has taken up with Weis’ daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried, completely lost in her thankless role), fled from 'time-keeper’ Raymond (Cillian Murphy, the only cast member who convinces) and disrupts the 'financial’ system as if it were as easy as restarting your laptop.
Filled with cornball time-related puns and groaning genre tropes, it’s inconceivable that the script for this camp mess came from the mind of the New Zealand-born talent who constructed the thoroughly convincing Gattaca, wrote the Oscar-nominated script for The Truman Show (1998) and made the best unwatched movie of 2005, Nicholas Cage’s The Lord of War. Here, numerous scenes outplay their functionality, pacing seems superfluous to the production, and even the simplest staging of key moments is terrible. (In one instance that amused preview patrons, Will and Sylvia fail to notice a gun-wielding Raymond running towards them on a straight road"¦ until he is five feet in front of them.)
Much like the visual aesthetic he applied to Gattaca, Niccol’s film-world is heavily influenced by '50s design: couches, cars, collars and colours all reflect the period and it looks nice. But in light of the film’s other failings the question is 'Why?" In Time seems to exist solely to gloat about its own shallowness; its very being appears only to pair two hot stars in a potential crowd-pleaser. One predicts its fate will be as the butt of jokes about grand Hollywood misfires... in time.
