As with The Truman Show and S1m0ne, writer/director Andrew Niccol creates a futuristic metaphor in In Time, which sets contemporary class-angst in the context of an imaginary future where money has been replaced by time and we are genetically engineered to live forever. The catch – there’s always a catch – is that a small number of rich have horded all of the “time,” which is stored in little stamp-like cassettes and in one’s body, tracked by glowing digital readers on the forearm. The throngs of poor who populate In Time’s “time zone” ghettos are forced to live in the day-to-day, working in industrial era factories to earn enough hours to get them through the night. In Time is our future through the eyes of Occupy Wall Street: a great conspiracy of the rich that eliminates the poor. “Many must die so that a few can live forever,” the disaffected rich boy Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer) says before he, tired of living, kills himself.
Before Hamilton“runs out of time,” he offers a “time share” to time-crunched Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) by touching wrists together and exchanging the digital life juice. If these puns on time-related figures of speech bother you, don’t go to In Time: half its script (that’s not hyperbole) is filled with time-puns. Salas is three years past twenty-five, the year in which everyone’s internal clock starts ticking down, meaning he needs to find time to stay alive each day. When he helps the suicidal Hamilton out of a bind, Hamilton gives Salas a century’s worth of time, meaning Salas can not only live for another 100 years, but he can use his years to cross class barriers into New Greenwich, where all the rich people live.
The rest of In Time plays out Niccol’s time-is-money presence with some James Bond flair, Salas waltzing into a casino and using his street-smart poker playing experience to take the world’s richest man, Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser) for a millennium. Immortal and loaded, Salas catches the eye of Philippe’s daughter, Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried), whom he charms with his carpe diem attitude, the opposite of the rich immortals who live in fear of dying by some accidental means. Soon enough, however, the Timekeepers (read: police) are after Salas, suspecting him of murderingHamilton. A lack-luster Bonnie and Clyde-inspired chase flick follows as the most attractive male on set grabs the most attractive female and they dash out the door.
Time puns and conceptual inconsistencies aside (why have we been engineered to have our life’s time so easily pick-pocketed?), Niccols concept is intriguing enough, but more as barroom banter than full length feature film. His metaphor, the substitution for time and money, allows for a handful of social perspective on the way we conceive of and live our lives: our obsession with wealth a prestige, fear of death, insulated attitudes towards life. But Niccols script is so clunky, forced, and corny that In Time is often down-right painful to watch. Ironically, basic spatial and time-inconsistencies abound, as Salas and Weis run about the United States in mere minutes, seeking to disrupt the time market by spreading millions of years around the poor ghetto “time zones.”
Though he is hampered by a hackneyed script, Timberlake is at fault here for allowing much of the film’s drama to lapse. Deliberate and sincere, he brings little but green, boyish charm to the role, showing little sass as a leading man and even less grit and pace as an action hero. I really like Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker in last year’s The Social Network, but if In Time and Bad Teacher are any indication of his real acting talent, that role may prove a high water mark.
