subversive economic commentary disguised as SF thriller

Rating: 7/10 (17 March 2013)

If all you understand is the sci-fi thriller part of this, you should still enjoy it; there are car chases and bullets flying and action-y music and people climbing fire escapes in the night: all that thriller stuff. It's done well.
Plot: In the future, longevity science has reached its pinnacle, and everybody is given to age 25, physically frozen there, plus given one "gratis" year to set up an adult life, which counts down on a readout on your wrist...and as a consequence, time--your own time left to death-- becomes the commodity that we work for, trade for, spend, and that rich people horde by using up poor people. Poor people, running madly from one job to another, pushed harder and harder by inflation and rising work quotas, living in dangerous conditions with their peers, always at risk of having their few remaining hours stolen, fight the countdown. Endlessly they fight it. Many lose the race, get "timed out," their clock stops, and they fall dead on the street. (But they sure look good when they do.) Poor people inexplicably waste their precious minutes on booze and low-level gambling. Our hero, a ghetto wage-worker, rebels against this and becomes Robin Hood, stealing time from the wealthy and returning it to the poor, whence it came.
What's so clever here is that, of course, this is the world we already inhabit. We sell our precious limited moments to corporations in order to buy stuff we don't need that they advertise to us on their corporate television programs (both in the programs and via commercials) and we don't say "no" or use our critical minds to see what's going on. We buy lottery tickets and stuff on credit. And so they eat up our lives and we keel over dead before they do. (in the US, if you are poor, you can actually do that on the steps of a hospital and if you have no insurance, well, good riddance to ya, is the attitude of the plutocrats and the hospital administrators who work for them.) I found myself laughing and nodding through this as clever points of similarity arose.
And this is what s-f does well, when it works. It says, here, let me tell you this wholly imaginary tale about the future or another planet, but it's really holding up a mirror about today for those who have the wits to see themselves in it. Very clever writing in this movie, and decent everything else.