Bad Acting & Weak Writing Ruin a Good Idea

Rating: 3/10 (13 March 2012)

Imagine a future time where we cut out currency as a "middle man" & just exchange time for goods & services. Isn't this in essence what we do anyway? Every dollar you have represents time you worked. But if the correlation was more direct, would life seem more important? Would we be less likely to waste time if you used it to pay for everything? As it turns out this movie seems to have an underlying agenda of warming your heart to what I call "Robin Hood" politics, i.e. redistribution of wealth. This could really get me off point into talking about why simply being rich doesn't make you a bad person (though there are plenty greedy rich people out there) and that stealing from the rich & giving to the poor does nothing to help the poor learn to sustain themselves, but I'll try to stick to this movie. Justin Timberlake's bad acting aside, the plot felt forced & unbelievable. Will's motivation was having a hard life in the ghetto, & when he his gifted a century by a stranger, he sees his chance to go take down those he sees responsible for his poverty: the rich (& I bet the Occupy Wall Street people loved this one). A weak point in the plot is that our unlikely hero happens to be really good at gambling & turns his hundred years into thousands. Another weak point is the Time Keepers' (cops) desperation for taking Will down. Maybe I missed the depth of the Will's father's connection, but it seemed like the Time Keepers were over zealous to catch a man they *think* killed someone. It was kind of interesting, though irrelevant, that all the future cars seemed to be "futurized" 1960's vehicles. However, turning a Barracuda into an electric car short-circuits the "bad ass" quality of the Time Keeper's fleet (pun intended). Here is a good place to note some of the low quality in this film: in order to give a futuristic feel, the producers borrowed some Star Trek door sounds for the cars & stole Back to the Future's DeLorean engine sounds for them. To top it off, at one point Will & Sylvia are forced off the road & the crash scene looks like they pushed a Hot Wheel over a dirt berm. I have always felt like a story written from the heart, a story the writer really believes in, will almost always turn out well even if production isn't great. I feel as though this movie was written just to be a blockbuster & engineered to make money. Those are my least favorite types of movies.