Excellent idea, inevitably flawed execution. Serious disappointment,

Rating: 4/10 (10 March 2012)

The idea of taking the basic idea behind the classic LOGAN'S RUN, where in order to stretch limited resources to the maximum an earlier generation had limited all life expectancy to a set maximum (around the age of the average movie-goer), and giving it a more complex and "sophisticated" extension (some half thought out clap-trap about the potential for and downside of immortality based on the shorter lives of others is a late afterthought) was not a bad one, but positing a society where all aging stops at 25 *without* offering an explanation of how society got reorganized on these lines also presents certain problems which these film makers proved unequal to.
With no "character" actors available under the concept (the closest we are allowed is The Big Bang Theory's excellent Johnny Galecki, wasted in a small role as Timberlake's sidekick in the film's early scenes), the film has a real problem finding characters the film goer finds interesting enough to care about. Timberlake and his co-star, Ms. Seyfried, have the requisite charisma and, in Mr. Timberlake's case, a growing acting ability, but the other twenty-somethings all tend to blend into each other with only Cillian Murphy's latter-day "Javert" and (thanks to his TV personality) Matt Bomer as a suicidal "century holder" making much of an impression - and the film's extremely cold heart has too weak a beat to sustain interest even when it leaves its original concept and enters "Bonnie & Clyde" territory.
When you can't care about the characters and you give up on any hope of a "happy ending" near mid-film (having failed to say how "the system" came into being, they can't make us believe in the financial principles it would take to bring it down - let alone return the leads to a safe life) and worst of all, when the journey ceases to strike the viewer as credible, the film which pretends to concentrate on time as a metaphor for money risks leaving the audience resenting the time it's taken from IT - and at movie prices these days, that's a pretty fair parallel - long before the silly ending.
What a pity. I had really been looking forward to this one.