All dressed up and nowhere to go

Rating: Null/10 (4 November 2011)

It is either the future or some alternate reality. The population is encoded with a clock which is geared to your life functions. When you reach 25, the clock starts ticking away your last year. The currency on which everything operates is time to be added to, or taken away from, your clock / life expectancy. You can earn time, spend time, trade time, win time, or steal time (and all these things happen). Will Salas (Justin Timberlake), who lives in an impoverished time zone, is give over 100 years by jaded rich man Henry Hamilton who has wearied of life. Will makes his way into the affluent time zone where he wins more time gambling with time mega-tycoon Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser). However, by-the-book time policeman Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy) believes that Will murdered Hamilton, so he confiscates Will's time, and Will kidnaps Weis' daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried) and goes on the run.
The idea of a dystopian society where an early death is pre-determined has been done before, of course, notably in Logan's Run, but I can't recall a story where life expectancy is the unit of currency, and the rich live longer at the expense of the poor dying early. It is a nice - and original - notion, and the surface of this society is well realised.
The trouble is that, having come up with a terrific idea, writer/director (also writer of Gattaca and The Trueman Show) doesn't seem to have much idea of what to do with it. We spend a lot of time seeing the privation in the poor sector and the privilege in the rich sector, and the crooks who steal time, and how you pay tolls to cross time zones (it costs you a month to cross out of the poorest zone, a year to cross into the richest zone), but what we are left with is ultimately a chase movie and, what's more, a chase movie which doesn't have any real resolution. I enjoyed it, but I felt that there was a great deal of potential in the premise which wasn't touched.
On the other hand, Amanda Seyfried wins two prizes, one for the Bulgiest Bra Scene (sadly, the time police raid interrupted a promising game of strip poker), and the other for the Longest Sprint In Inappropriate Clothing Scene (about 1,000 metres, flat out, in a miniskirt barely bigger than a wide belt, and high heels which were almost as tall as she was).