Review | In Time
High-concept sci-fi mingles awkwardly with half-baked socio-political allegory in future-flung thriller, In Time. Writer/director Andrew Niccoli’s feature-length interpretation of the aphorism ‘time is money’ is big on intrigue but as the clock winds down there’s not much satisfaction to be had.
Sometime in the future things have gone a little bit weird. The human race has, for some reason, been genetically engineered to stop aging when they hit 25, leaving the planet with a youthful population that mostly look like they’re from a Calvin Klein commercial. The flipside of this genetic tampering is once hitting the quarter-century everyone has only one year of life left – indicated by a glowing 15-digit countdown embedded in the forearm – if you want more you have to earn it, one way or another.
Slaving away in ‘the ghetto’ Will Salas (played by a suitably cropped Justin Timberlake) works away at his factory job to earn minutes for himself and his doting mother – who, like everyone else, also appears to be 25. Around these parts a phone call costs a minute, a cup of coffee costs four and an overdue rent payment could quite literally be the death of you – you either live day to day, or you don’t.
Across town, in swanky New Greenwhich, it’s a different story. They drive big shiny cars, walk as slow as they please and gamble away decades for fun. It seems the time-currency system works about as equally as the monetary system that preceded it and a series of events – both fortuitous and tragic – gets Mr Salas thinking this isn’t exactly fair. With over a century suddenly in his possession and little else to lose, the angry young man decides its time to take the greedy for every second they’re worth, and maybe pick up a sexy sidekick along the way.
It sounds prickly enough and, as pure spectacle goes, it is; there’s screeching car chases, gratuitous roof jumping, a few dresses hit the ground, lifetimes are put on the line, banks robbed, loved ones avenged. But all the action and titillation is built around a frustratingly murky core. The characters have secret histories but we never find out what they are. The system’s rotten to the core but we never find out who calls the shots. The entire human race has become a science experiment but we’ll never now when, where, why or how.
That just leaves us with Bonnie and Clyde on a deadline. He’s a little lukewarm as antiheroes go, she’s cute, plucky and impossibly nimble in high heels and when the countdown hits zero it’s hard to work up too much enthusiasm. The brightest spark on the cast is the lawman on their trail, Time Keeper Raymond Leon. The talented Cillian Murphy is fascinating as the relentless geriatric cop still living in the spritely body of a 25-year-old – it’s the exact kind of unnerving weirdness the film could have done with more of.
In Time is an alluring sci-fi setup backed with some capably frenetic action that unfortunately runs out of steam with too much time still on the clock.
In Time is in cinemas now.
