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(M) ***
Director: Andrew Niccol.
Cast: Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy, Vincent Kartheiser, Alex Pettyfer, Olivia Wilde.
IMAGINE, if you can, a world where a small minority controls the vast majority of the wealth, while the majority of the population lives in ghettos, struggling to get by.
Imagine a world where the wealthy live extravagant and wasteful lifestyles, while the poor live day-to-day, working mindless jobs in the hopes of earning enough to scrape through until the end of the week or even just tomorrow.
Not hard to imagine is it, especially with the recent Global Financial Crisis and the increasing Occupy movement?
This all makes In Time, well, timely. Written and directed by Niccol (Gattaca, S1m0ne, Lord Of War), this film's central conceit is that money has been replaced by time. The ageing gene has been eradicated so people stop growing old at the age of 25 and from that point on you have to earn additional days, weeks and months of your life by working for them.
People need time to live, but also to pay their rent, buy food and cover their bills. Everyone's lives are dictated by a read-out imprinted in their arms that shows how much time they have left. It's the equivalent of a bank account, except that when it hits zero, you're dead. This creates a class structure where the rich are immortal and the other 99 per cent run the risk of keeling over in the street, unable to make ends meet.
Our hero in this quasi-futuristic world is Will Salas (Timberlake), a factory drone who saves the life of a man with a deathwish and decades in the bank.
Inheriting the rich man's extra time, Will gains entry into high society but the Time Keepers - a type of police force - don't like wealth to be distributed to those that aren't already wealthy as it disrupts the balance of things.
This sets Will on a mission to right some wrongs and fight against the one per cent - at least until his time runs out.
It's a brilliant framework for what is essentially a chase movie for much of its duration, and it's a set-up made even more compelling by recent events, which makes In Time's analogy hit even harder.
The film is certainly flawed. Aside from some occasionally bad editing and clunky dialogue, there are plot holes big enough to hold an Occupy protest in. For example, one character in the film works in a factory that manufactures time dispensers but never thinks to rob the factory in his quest to gain wealth. Instead he robs a time bank... which turn out to be incredibly poorly protected, despite the fact that time has become the most valuable resource in the world.
These kind of silly moments tend to get overridden by the engrossing nature of the bigger ideas in the movie, plus the plot crackles along at the speed a chase movie should, aided by the fact that there's not just one clock ticking down but many.
Timberlake has a track record for being great in both good movies (The Social Network) and bad movies (Southland Tales), and he continues his good run here, turning in a solid performance yet again.
He's ably backed up by Seyfried as a little rich girl who wants to "live and do something foolish", and Murphy as an intense Time Keeper, while Kartheiser and Pettyfer are patchy in supporting roles.
In Time really succeeds on the strength of its concept. Far from flawless, it's got an unavoidably (ahem) timely message, plenty of good ideas, and a pace to keep you from counting down the minutes 'til it ends.
