In Time Review: Could Have, Should Have, Would Have Been Great

Let me open by reiterating my long-standing, enduring, slightly creepy adoration for Justin Timberlake. I’ve been a fan since, well, before it was technically legal. Since he quit making records (sadface) we’ve all watched pretty much every endeavor he stuck his hands in turn into a success. Even so, after all of that, the image of him as the lead in an action movie left me skeptical.

I am happy to report that Justin held up his end of the bargain in In Time, and his acting has improved by leaps and bounds. There is not one moment in the film where I thought of him as JT instead of Will Sallas, and though in a lot of ways his performance seems simply adequate, in other ways it is so much more than I expect.

Which is not to say that this is a great film. It’s not even a good film, which is disappointing given the original premise and occasionally well executed world building.

I knew we were in trouble from the opening sequence, in which Will (Justin Timberlake) states in voice over (paraphrase) “I don’t know how things got this way, or why. It doesn’t matter, because this is how it is now.”

The sentiment is understandable, it is. It doesn’t work, however, when you’re not only expecting an audience to buy a premise, but for the next almost two hours you’re going to build a world on that premise and try to execute a story in a world no one fully understands.

A quick look at director Andrew Niccol’s future: Instead of money, the world’s currency is time. Every human being is genetically engineered to live until they are 25, then they have 1 more year. If they don’t earn more time, after that year, they die. You can give time away, you can share it. You can earn it at a job, but bottom line – everything costs time, and the prices are always going up. The world has a not unrecognizable class system, in which the rich get richer (are, for all intents and purposes immortal) and the poor die young, kicked into gutters while people look the other way. Each person has a running clock on their forearm ticking down the seconds, minutes, or years they have remaining. Our hero, Will Sallas, lives day-to-day (or paycheck-to-paycheck, as it were).

The film’s relationship to, and commentary on, our own society are not hard to grasp. Switch money for time, and it’s not so different from the world we live in. A few have millions. The rest have nothing. In In Time there doesn’t seem to be a middle class, which is a big difference, but one that many people might argue we’re headed. There are a million points at which the problems of our society intersect with the society in this film; I don’t believe it’s meant to be a hidden metaphor for the widening gap between rich and poor in America today, and the consequences awaiting us all in the not too distant future.

Will lives with his mother (Olivia Wilde, who is fantastic) in the “ghetto” of Dayton, OH. He goes out for a drink one night with his pal Borel (Johnny Galecki) and they encounter a man with more than a century left to live. He shouldn’t be in a place like Dayton, a fact Will points out. Men are killed in the ghetto for a week. They would do anything to steal the kind of years this man has left.

The man, Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer, swoon), states he doesn’t much care. Before the night is over a local gang, led by Fortis (Alex Pettyfer), tries to make Will’s prediction come true. Instead, Will spirits Hamilton away and they manage to hide. The two have a conversation in which we learn that Henry has lived for over a hundred years and has no inclination to live a hundred more. He asks Will what he would do if he had that kind of time and Will states firmly, “I sure as heck wouldn’t waste it.”

In the morning Will wakes up with over a hundred years on his clock, a note on the window that says don’t waste my time, and a “timed out” Henry Hamilton. Excited but trying to keep it under wraps, Will meets his friend Borel and shares 10 years. Next he goes to meet his mother, ready to finally take her to New Greenwich (the land of milk and honey, for the purposes of the film). His mother gets on the bus to meet him, but when she learns the bus now costs two hours instead of one, she can’t afford it. She tells the bus driver, “I only have an hour and a half. It’s a two hour walk from here.”

He looks at her and replies, “I guess you’d better run.”

I won’t spoil this for you. Olivia Wilde’s part in this film is relatively small, but this is one of the best, most memorable scenes in the movie. It packs an emotional wallop and is one of the better done snatches of world-building.

Once in New Greenwich Will begins, in my opinion, to waste Hamilton’s time. He spends it on a luxury suite, food, clothes, a kick-ass car, and a high stakes poker game. Which turns out okay, since he wins more time that he ever dreamed possible and meets his opponent’s daughter, Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried).

I have to take a moment to say whoever styled Amanda Seyfried for this movie should be fired from life. Her hair looked terrible, her makeup was even worse. She wore these impossibly skimpy outfits and eighteen-inch heels the entire film. Even later, when she was wearing other people’s clothes and all they were doing was running all day, every day. Eighteen-inch heels. Running for your life. Seriously.

Meanwhile the Timekeepers (police), led by Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy) investigate the loss of Henry Hamilton’s time. It’s their job to make sure too much time doesn’t get into the wrong hands and upset the balance. Basically to keep people in their place. Leon and his officers show up at a party hosted by Sylvia’s father, Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser), and remove all the time Will has been given or won up to this point, leaving him with only two hours. Instead of going quietly, Will uses Sylvia as a hostage and they run.

After a few days, they decide running isn’t enough, and this science fiction flick turns into Bonnie and Clyde Go to the Future. You can take it from there, I’m not into spoilers and honestly, there isn’t much more to tell because I’ve explained about everything we’re given explanations for.

There are a few poignant scenes and pieces of world-building that work so well it makes me sad that we lose them in a maze of plot holes, flat characters, and unexplained concepts. The “time zones” are one, which are areas cordoned off in the U.S. based on how much time people have. You have to spend months and years to cross between them, ensuring the poor stay that way and the rich don’t have to watch them die. Beautiful concept. The Timekeepers are another gem, albeit one that could have been explored in more depth. The scene with Will’s mother and the bus, equally stunning. There’s a part where Will goes running through New Greenwich while everyone else is walking at a leisurely pace, illustrating the difference between their world and his with so much force, but no words. One of the last Will/Sylvia scenes, another with Borel’s wife and baby, are both also well done.

Unfortunately, those quiet, powerful moments disappear like needles in a haystack of questions no one bothers to answer. There’s an interesting storyline with Will’s father that is dropped and never picked up again. The Timekeeper, Leon, has backstory I was dying to learn more about, something to let us understand what he found so desperately important about his job. How exactly the redistribution of “wealth” would overthrow the world order. Most glaringly, how the physiology of the genetic programming works. Everyone stops aging at twenty-five, but if your heart is engineered to stop beating one year later, how is it possible to extend that life by adding numbers to a clock? It’s not believable, but since this concept is the entire foundation for the film, we’re forced to go with it even though no one takes the time to explain.

Even so, the film didn’t bore me. It could have benefitted from a longer setup. There are plenty of running running running for you life (in eighteen-inch heels) scenes that could have been slashed in order to make room for, I don’t know, something that told us anything important.  The characters, particularly Sylvia, desperately needed more development. The events that took place in the scope of the movie make Will easy enough to believe, but when Sylvia leaves her rich, pampered life to play Bonnie to Will’s Clyde in the ghetto, living from day-to-day, we really don’t understand why.

I mean, JT is hot, but I don’t think that’s a good enough reason. Maybe.

Basically we’re supposed to gather from a few toss away lines that she’s never believed in the things her father does, and fears she’ll never get the chance to live even though she’ll never die.

Movies like this one make me more sad than anything, because they’re the might-have-beens of Hollywood. We’re all asking for more originality, something fresh, something new, something exciting. It’s disappointing when they actually try to give us those things, starting with a bang up idea, gathering a halfway decent cast…but fall down just short of their goal.

In Time has a great concept. The execution does not do justice to the idea, and will relegate this film to the dusty (but crowded) shelves of the could-have-been-great but instead easily forgotten pictures.

Photos Courtes of Stephen Vaughan and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.