In Time

This is a prime example of a good idea executed poorly.  It’s sad when you can see the potential while it’s being killed right in front of your eyes.

In the future everyone has a set amount of time to live.  The first 25 years are free but after that you only have one additional year to get your shit together.  The glowing green clock on your arm starts ticking and it can’t be stopped.  Because of this the currency is in time.  So if you want a cup of coffee it’ll cost you four mins, a bus ride can cost an hour, your rent will be a couple of days, etc.  When you work you get paid in time so that’s one way to stay alive.  You can also transfer time from person to person by grabbing someone’s arm just like how you can give someone ten bucks.  Potentially you could live forever as long as you have time on your clock.  So everyone talks about time and almost nothing but time (which is something that took longer than I expected to get used to).  And just like people with and without money there are those with tons of time (like decades or hundreds of years) and those with little (like days or hours).  There doesn’t appear to be a middle class but hang on to that thought for later in this piece.  The two classes are separated by time zones (get it?) that cost like months and years to cross which gives the rich town and the poor ghetto a buffer.

So that’s a cool concept, right?  It’s pretty damn original and has potential.  Well it’s too bad that the script is a piece of shit.  The story goes that Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) lives in the poor town and one day he saves a guy’s life that has a century on his clock.  This dude is fed up with life and actually wants to die so while Will is sleeping he gives him all of his time.  The mystery man is dead and Salas now has over 100 years.  He goes to tell his mother but she runs out of time and dies because they jacked up the bus fare, fuckin’ dicks.  Will vows to bring the system down or make them pay or something.  He goes to the rich town, finds the love interest (Amanda Seyfried (Red Riding Hood)) and then it very oddly turns into Bonnie and Clyde/Robin Hood for the rest of the movie.  These two rob banks of time and give it to the poor.

First off I just want to say that Timberlake disappointed.  Did anyone else think he was awesome in Alpha Dog?  Did anyone else think Alpha Dog was a good movie?  I thought it was a lot of fun, well except for the end.  That was kinda tragic but otherwise I had a blast.  And Justin was perfect in the role he was cast.  I think that’s because it wasn’t too far removed from who he is in real life, some fun lovin’, pot smokin’, party throwin’, lady’s man.  Sure he’s involved in some illegal shit but that’s part of what makes his character appealing.  In In Time Timberlake is like the perfect person.  He’s always helping people by giving them his time, he wants people to see that the system if fucked up and corrupt, he runs from the cops but knows that they’re just doing their job and aren’t the real bad guys, he’s willing to sacrifice himself at the end to save his girlfriend, he buys his mother flowers and etc.  This guy doesn’t have a flaw of any kind and it makes me fucking hate this character.  Salas is such a good person that it’s annoying.  And Timberlake gives a pretty fucking bad performance too.  He can’t do a range of emotions at all.  He can do happy just fine and maybe angry for a second but anything else?  I don’t think so.  Watch the scene where Timberlake tries to convey sadness after his character’s mother dies and you’ll realize that he shouldn’t play people that aren’t like Frankie Ballenbacher from Alpha Dog.  Oh, and everyone else is really bad in this except Cillian Murphy (Red Eye) but he’s a little flat.  He plays the cop hot on Will’s trail and he’s got the badass name the Timekeeper.

The whole movie has this real slick look to it like you’re watching a Giorgio Armani ad come to life.  Almost everything is in black and white, the clothes, the cars, the buildings, etc.  They were going for a retro future look, like the cars are all from the 60’s or 70’s (but they make that whirring noise when they start up and stop like all futuristic cars in these types of movies) and there aren’t any cell phones (they actually use a payphone).  I’m not really against the way this picture looks but I’m not really into it either so in the end it didn’t do much for me.

There are three main reasons why this film doesn’t work.  The first is the characters are bland.  No one is exciting or interesting to watch.  Everyone feels stiff and too confined within their roles. 

Second is the pacing.  There’s so much downtime with Timberlake and Seyfried talking about how much time sucks and that they wish it didn’t have to be this way.  We get it fellas.  We got it in the first ten minutes.  You don’t need to hit us over the head with this shit for the entire movie.  Think about it.  Pictures about money and greed don’t have the characters constantly talking about money and nothing but.  There’s usually other shit that happens and non-money topics come up.  With this film the people are too enamored with their own world.  They can’t get past the fucking ticking clock on their arms and that prevents anything else from entering the conversation. 

And third, oddly enough, is the we’re-running-out-of-time situation is overplayed.  For almost the entire picture Salas is almost out of time.  He’s constantly down to a minute and change or even seconds but he always finds some way to get more time.  I mean in theory this is exactly what I want to see out the concept presented to us.  It sounds exciting if our guy has to continually think of ways to get time.  It should sorta be like the Crank movies where the whole thing’s on edge.  But here it gets boring real fast.  I never felt like Will was actually gonna run out of time after a little bit.  I never got sucked in and felt worried that he might not get out of one of his many sticky situations.  And I think I know exactly where this idea died for me.  When Salas travels to the rich town he decides to go to the casino and play some poker, well one hand of poker anyway.  People are wagering like 100,000 years (which I don’t think Will has but he’s able to bet it anyway) and he ponies up.  In a total James Bond type scene he has a sly conversation with the bad guy during the hand about possibly being out of his league.  Will wagers everything he’s got only leaving himself a couple of seconds, doesn’t bat an eye and wins a million years or some shit.  Not only is this scene out of place (arguably the whole movie is out of place) but the day before when Salas was talking to the mystery dude that coughed up a century, Will told him that he wouldn’t waste all that time.  Blowing all of your time on a hand of poker is clearly wasting it.  This is also after Will vows revenge.  Gambling everything you have isn’t a good way to get your revenge plot in motion in my opinion, especially if it’s going to leave you dead.  Anyway this was the part of the movie that made me not care about this character running out of time.  If he doesn’t value it why should I?

Obviously this film is a statement on inequality in society though.  It feels like the filmmakers were going for more of a message than entertainment which I guess is fine but it’s so heavy handed.  The film is saying that in the future the middle class will disappear and there will only be the super rich and the super poor.  The rich will control everything, including raising rates to keep the poor in poverty, and live forever.  The poor must die because the conundrum is that with this premise of time=life you can’t have everyone live for eternity.  There wouldn’t be enough room or resources.  The question they pose is would you allow people to die so you could be immortal?  And of course Will says at the end that not one person should die for immortality.  The film argues that time (money) should be spread more evenly among the people and not horded by a small group.  The bad guy contests that doing so will create an imbalance and the world will come to an end.  But the thing is that the world is already imbalanced so for these very poor people they don’t have much, if anything, to lose.  And there’s also a message in there that rich people don’t really “live”.  They’re just soulless beings while the non-rich can “do a lot in a day”.  I get what they’re saying but I just wish they had done it in a subtler way.  No one likes being obviously preached to, especially in a sci-fi adventure flick.

I thought Salas and co. were going to find a cure for this clock thing and everyone would be freed from it.  All people get to start living normally at 25 until they die naturally.  But instead it’s about trying to find a way to make people’s lives more bearable with this man made catastrophe by giving them more time. 

It’s not a terribly fun film.  There are too many plot holes, boring characters, the production design is rigid, there’s a really bad CGI car crash into the L.A. storm drain, there’s a secondary villain whose purpose I didn’t understand, the thing drags a lot and the messaging is shoved in your face.  I want to say that it’s miscast too but the movie is pretty bad so that doesn’t seem so out of place.  Also, everyone in this is supposed to look 25 because in the universe of the movie that’s when time stands still for the human body.  But they didn’t cast anyone that looks that age.  Not only do they all look at the very least 30 but there are clearly age differences between the characters.  Nobody’s buying that Cillian Murphy, Johnny Galecki (Roseanne) and Justin Timberlake are all fuckin’ 25.

And speaking of the world this picture lives in, what if someone cuts off your clock arm?  Do you die or does the clock keep ticking on your dismembered arm?  I mean I like that you can kill someone in a conventional way even before their time is up in this movie but if the clock arm gets injured does that affect your time?  Is the clock something you’re born with or do they insert it when they’re writing up your birth certificate?  It would be cool if you weren’t born with it so there could be this whole underground society of non-clockers.    

Alright that’s enough rambling.  Even though these guys came up with a good idea it didn’t turn out very well.  Way too schlocky.