Extremely disappointing considering all it had going for it!

Rating: 6/10 (6 March 2012)

'IN TIME': Three Stars (Out of Five)
A futuristic dystopian science fiction film that starts out with a great premise but loses all of it's creativity and originality to routine by the numbers action scenes. It's written and directed by Andrew Niccol, who also helmed the similar themed 'GATTACA' which was quite good. Niccol also wrote 'THE TRUMAN SHOW' which was a very good film as well so it's a little surprising that he handled this one so ham-handedly. The film stars Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried and Cillian Murphy and Murphy is the only one who brings anything to the table. The film as a whole is very clunky and disappointing.
It's set in a world where people stop aging at 25 and will die a year later if they don't earn enough currency to prolong their lives. Time is traded as money and the rich live as immortals while the poor scrape by what ever they can just to make it another day. Your remaining time is worn on your arm, in a digital readout, and scanned to pay all monetary transactions. Prices and taxes are raised all the time without warning in order to keep the weak majority at bay. Timberlake plays Will Salas, who lives with his mother (Olivia Wilde) in the ghettos and never has a full day's worth of hours. One night he helps a rich man, Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer), from being mugged and killed in a bar by gangsters known as the Minutemen. Hamiltion repays Salas by giving him all his remaining time, 116 years before committing suicide. He passes on some words of wisdom and lets Will know that everyone could and should live a happy natural life and then die. Will is then suspected of murdering Hamilton and goes on the run with a millionaire's daughter, Sylvia (Seyfried), he meets while flaunting his new money. The two begin robbing from the rich and giving to the poor while trying to disrupt the system and avoiding the Timekeeper (Murphy), who polices time.
The idea behind the film is the perfect social commentary and is especially relevant to our times and modern economy. Life in the film isn't really that much different from modern reality. It's a shame that such a great idea was wasted though. It could have been the perfect Philip K. Dick type sci-fi film and instead we get a weak action film starring Justin Timberlake! His casting was the first way the movie went wrong but there's a lot more at fault to it than just that. Every word of dialogue seems forced and every scene seems like nothing more than the plot and action formula just pushing itself forward. There's no heart or character to it at all. Most of all the film is just disappointing, considering all it had going for it.
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