Writer/director Andrew Niccol’s latest sci-fi drama In Time introduces us to a world where people are genetically engineered to stop aging at 25. That sounds like a pretty great deal at first, but there’s a catch. Once a person hits 25 a clock on their wrist activates and they only have one year to live after that. Time becomes currency. It can be transferred from person to person through touch, it can be transferred and stored through portable machines that work a lot like our credit card terminals. And, like in our world, there are rich and poor. Those living in the good neighborhoods have centuries of time at their disposal, those in the ghetto never more than a handful of hours. This creates two worlds, one where the rich live forever indulging in their every whim, and one in which the corpses of the poor litter the streets. The refrain, “For a few to be immortal, many must die” gets repeated several times. Wow, in the current social climate of Occupy Wallstreet protests and calls for global financial reform, do you think that Niccol could have possibly made a more relevant film? Talk about striking while the iron is hot.
The only problem is, Niccol’s satire doesn’t strike hard enough. Yes, the lifetime disparities in this film are clearly supposed to mirror our world, where the vast majority of wealth is controlled by a small minority, but past creating the surface metaphor In Time doesn’t dig any deeper into the similarities of this world and ours. Making people’s lives represent money could have been a powerful tool to explore the horror of economic inequality, but instead of telling a truly human story about suffering Niccol seems content to use his sci-fi setup as a framework for pretty typical action scenarios. Upsetting the balance of power, where the immortal rich have to share some of their lifetime with the not-long-of-this-world poor, could have been an interesting way to make comments on our own economic reality and what the consequences of more equally distributing the world’s wealth among its populace really would be. But instead we just get a Bonnie and Clyde type story where a poor kid from the ghetto named Will (Justin Timberlake) and a rebellious rich girl named Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried) go on a spree of time bank robberies and redistribute the years among the poor. What you’re left with is a fairly limp, if not basely quaffable action movie that feels mostly like a missed opportunity.
One of the things that I was generally happy with were the performances. The stars here all do what they can with what they’re given; they just aren’t given enough and their characters could be a lot more interesting. Timberlake and Seyfried are playing prototypical protagonists, without any defining quirks or characteristics that might set them apart from the pack and make them memorable. Both actors are perfectly serviceable though. Timberlake snuck into acting through the backdoor of comedic cameos, but I actually like him better when he’s not trying to be funny. In The Social Network he proved that he could handle dramatic work well, and here he proves that he can successfully anchor an action movie as well. Seyfried is a charming actress, and once her character cuts loose and decides to fight the good fight she gets a couple of fun moments here, but charming as the actress is, the character was too much of a blank page. When we meet her she is quiet and mysterious to the point of exuding danger. But then, after we’re introduced to her, we realize that she’s just a normal young woman. The change in the character didn’t seem to happen for any organic reason, or stem from a choice that Seyfried made for her performance, it just seemed to happen at the service of the story. At first the script wanted this world to appear mysterious, so that’s how Sylvia acted, then it needed a heroine, so her character changed to accommodate that need. If there is one big problem at the center of this film it’s the clunkiness of the script.
It doesn’t just extend to the Sylvia character either, the whole movie is ripe with examples of characters behaving contrary to their motivations in order to move the story along. When a street urchin who lucks into a hundred extra years makes his way into the rich sector, there is no reason that Sylvia’s very wealthy father Philippe (Vincent Kartheiser) should take any interest in him; but because the story needs an excuse for Will and Sylvia to meet, he does. There is a scene where a group of vicious time pirates, who have had no qualms with quickly killing people and stealing their time throughout the film, corner Will and Sylvia in a hotel room. Their modus operandi is that they will quickly shoot the kids and take their time, but this time around the leader (Alex Pettyfer) decides he’s going to duel Will for the time instead. The choice is made for no reason other than the story needed to give Will an out. Plot rules over reality. Instead of seeking the truth in this world and in these characters, and letting their story play out like it naturally would, Niccol allows the needs of his story to supersede character, and that’s just not good writing.
The action we get is largely well staged, but it lacked tension and intrigue. Instead of having to come up with elaborate, risky plans to steal time, Will and Sylvia just sweep in and do it rather easily. The film spends a lot of time setting up Pettyfer’s character and his gang as a dangerous threat, and then they are easily dispatched. In Time only really worked for me when our dynamic duo of time liberators were playing cat and mouse with a time cop played by Cillian Murphy. Their dealings involved a lot of shootouts, car chases, and running across rooftops; and whenever the film deferred to mindless action I was generally happy. Plus, Murphy’s character is the best crafted in the film. Everyone else is blanketly good or evil, but Murphy’s Raymond contains some complexity. He’s a man of honor, driven by a warped sense of responsibility, even though he seems to understand deep down the inherent horrors of the system that he upholds.
If In Time had gone in a direction more toward social allegory and less toward generic action movie, then Raymond might have made an interesting protagonist. And despite the fact that I feel he’s developing well enough as an actor, perhaps Murphy would have made a better choice for a lead than Timberlake. He gives the best performance in this film already, and is generally underused. Alas, that’s not the movie we were given though, so there’s no point in dwelling. What we do get was slightly interesting, mildly entertaining, but generally just not very good, and not at all memorable. In time, I’m sure I’ll forget I ever even saw In Time.
