It looks good and moves along, but the dialog and the whole concept are really really weak.

Rating: 4/10 (14 April 2012)

In Time (2011)
The idea here is clever on paper, but it's squandered and made ridiculous.
Here's a near future where everything is bought and sold in terms of the hours or minutes remaining in your life. Everyone is physically frozen at age 25, I guess at some kind of physical ideal. But most people are right at the end of their lives, literally, with just a few hours or days or sometimes seconds on their clocks, which are visible on their arms like glowing phosphorescent tattoos. Simple things like catching buses or getting paid for a day's work is sometimes down to a second or two. If your clock runs out, you're dead. You might think this is dramatic, cliffhangers after cliffhangers, but it's to contrived to work.
The writing is bland to the point of awkwardness. The big moments are timed (naturally) down to the second in a brinksmanship that is more silly than dramatic. There are shades of lots of dystopian movies, from "Minority Report" to "Twelve Monkeys," and with maybe some "Back to the Future" with the retro-cool "Men in Black" edge. There are slicked out 60s cars and warmed over noir dialog. It's not supposed to be realist, of course, but it lacks some other kind of credibility to make you think any of it is reasonable even in its fictional world.
What's almost painful is the vision of this future where there are rich and poor and cops in black coats and bad guys in suits, that's fine. But the men are all hunks and the women traipse around in mini skirts and heels. All of them, all the time. Did I say dystopia? It's true that everyone is frozen at twenty-five years old, but youth is one thing and this thin, small minded cliché of a man's future world is thin at first and tiresome after the third scene.
You can see the influences here--call them references, homages--with some classic borrowed themes. Most of all, the two unlikely heroes, man and woman, end up being a futuristic Bonnie and Clyde on the run. It might seem entertaining. No, it IS entertaining, only if you don't give it too much credence. The light is terrific in a lot of scenes, and the photography is very fluid. The sets and scenery themselves are fun, lots of empty concrete bridges and night stuff and neon, and those beautiful big drainage canals in L.A..
It could have been terrific, but it's anything but timeless.