Yawner for a sci-fi movie

Rating: 4/10 (15 September 2012)

In Time is one of those sci-fi movies that takes a preposterous premise and spends its time trying desperately to make it seem reasonable. When a movie begins with an out-there plot (here, in that people use time as currency in order to live past age 25), it must support that storyline with something that makes the viewer forget how illogical it all is. In Time doesn't quite do that.
Thanks to a helpful plot device called genetic modification, in the future everyone lives to be exactly 25 years old, and then they have one year left (without aging), during which time they must barter, beg, borrow, steal in order to live longer. Weird premise (why would they genetically modify themselves to this end?), but okay. It is what it is, to use a cliché. Also, the world (city?) has been divided into districts, each well guarded, and each of course set up according to one's class. It's kind of interesting to see one district paying for a bus fare of ten minutes and another one betting one million years in a poker game.
Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) is from the slums and lives day to day with his mom, played briefly by Olivia Wilde. Will helps a stranger who happens to have a century stored up in him (don't ask how) out of danger in a seedy bar, only to watch helplessly as the same stranger, having donated almost all of his time to Will while the former slept, jump to his death. Naturally, a public camera recorded this, and just as naturally Will is suspected of murder.
The rest of the plot is just as simple, really. Will, who's running out of time in more ways than one, kidnaps the daughter of a rich businessman in order to, you know, buy more time. They meet cute, she helps him, and so on. Sure, it's implausible, but don't you know she's a rebel who's been chafing under the constant surveillance from her father? She even has guards in her hoity-toity district!
Yes, it's another fight-the-system-that-keeps-the-proles-in-line movie. It might remind you of The Island, which (despite being directed by Michael Bay) wasn't too bad. It, too, involved genetics and the morality of messing with them. But it's not an altogether favorable comparison. The Island had strong leads (Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson) and strong support from guys like Michael Clarke Duncan and Djimon Hounsou. In Time has Timberlake and, as the kidnapped daughter, Amanda Seyfreid. Seyfried usually plays blondes, leading me to believe she IS blonde, and here she is brunette. Trouble is, she looks like she's wearing a wig. She's not supposed to look like that, is she? Only if you're a hooker should you LOOK like you're wearing a wig. Just my opinion.
Timberlake is quite good, really, but he's up against what's really a dopey plot under a veneer of sci-fi creativity. The genetics angle is almost absent from the movie - the focus is on how much time people have, how they can get more, time lenders, time stealers, time keepers (like Cillian Murphy, here). Some people desperately want to live forever, hence the wagering of huge durations of time, whereas some, like Will Salas, just want to have enough time to get them through a day. Apparently this makes life more interesting.
Had this movie any real depth, it would have examined not only the moral implications of generically engineering humans to live only so long (while still allowing for extensions) but also the idea of literally wasting time. Live life to the fullest, make the most of your opportunities, stuff like that. But I didn't get any of that from this film at all. What I got was a lot of running, car chases, gunplay, sexual tension - you know, what you'd find in a typical Hollywood action movie anyway.
But this one didn't even reach its low standards. In Time may sound intriguing (ooh! genetic modification!), but it's nothing more than a garden-variety action movie set in yet another dystopian future, pitting the haves versus the have-nots. It's derivative, bereft of twists of any nature. It's, yes, I'll say it, a waste of time.