Timberlake's Doing Time
In the future time is quite literally money as when you hit your 25th birthday you stop aging but only have a year to live which the digital read out on your arm informs you of. But can you earn and trade time which means if you are time rich you can live for ever and stay looking and feeling 25 years old. When some one with centuries on his clock, having tired of living, gives it to Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) it should have been a godsend but all it does is lead to issues as he is suspected of murder and theft. It forces Will to go on the run with Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried) the daughter of the wealthy banker Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser) and together they go Robin Hood and steal from banks to give to the poor.
"In Time" hits you with a ton of thought processes and gets you gripped as we enter a world where a cup of coffee costs you 4 minutes and you can trade time by grasping each others arms. It is imaginative and also humorous as we enter the world of Will and meet his mother who is played by Olivia Wilde and of course looks like a 25 year old babe but we are told is in fact 50, that is sure to give children a mummy complex in this world which writer and director Andrew Niccol has come up with. He also gives us the ramifications of a world controlled by time where you could live for ever but do you really want to if you are always 25 and also suggests of a system which intentionally makes life hard for the poor in order to keep their lives short so the world doesn't become over crowded.
The thing is that whilst this futuristic world, or maybe parallel universe, is imaginative and makes you think "In Time" then ruins it by going Hollywood with a storyline about Will and Sylvia going all Bonnie & Clyde mixed with Robin Hood as Will wants to make the wealthy pay for making life for the working class so hard. It is still very entertaining and the action is snappy in a big screen way which will keep those who don't like to think too hard entertained as well as giving us this look different to the one we know. But after such a thought provoking idea to then deliver something quite routine is a disappointment.
Never the less the cast is well chosen with Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried making an appealing lead couple whilst Cillian Murphy is good as a time keeper who tracks down those suspected of stealing time. Plus who can ignore Olivia Wilde who is not only smoking hot as Will's mum but also gives us one of the movies tense scenes as the clock ticks down on her life.
What this all boils down to is that once again writer and director Andrew Niccol has come up with an entertaining idea for a future or parallel universe which has its own set of human controls. But "In Time" ends up falling in to the Hollywood trap and whilst making it an entertaining mainstream movie betrays the original idea it started out with.
