In Time

Andrew Niccol

The story: In this brave new world, a person stops growing older physically at the age of 25 and a timer imprinted on his arm starts counting down to death. But time is a transferable currency: The powerful live forever while the poor eke it out from hour to hour. Ghetto boy Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) wants to shake up the system and finds an unlikely partner in rich girl Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried).

The premise of time as a currency is a promising one, but writer-director Andrew Niccol does not quite seem to know how to spend his time exploring it.

What the moviegoer gets, first and foremost, is an unending stream of weak puns and wordplay. The cops are called timekeepers, a bunch of ruffians are known as the Minutemen and characters are referred to as “coming from time”, in a play on the phrase “coming from money”. It makes the treatment of the material feel too literal.

The way in which characters transfer, or steal, time from one another also seems faintly ridiculous: grabbing one another’s bare arms. You would think that everyone would be going around sheathed in arm-guards but that seems to be a big fashion faux pas.

Still, some of the coolly dystopian vibe of Niccol’s well-received sci-fi flick Gattaca (1997) can be found here, such as in the forbidding concrete barriers that separate the well-off time zones, where nobody runs, from the ghettoes, where sleeping in is a luxury.

And there is something undeniably hypnotic about watching a life ticking through its final seconds, waiting, so to speak, for one’s number to be up.

Niccol builds tension with an early scene when Will and his mother (Olivia Wilde) run to meet each other as the seconds melt away. But the image becomes overused and its impact is diminished.

The film feels like a missed opportunity, especially given the cast assembled, from Cillian Murphy as self-righteous cop Leon to Vincent Kartheiser as heartless banking magnate Philippe Weis.

While Timberlake and Seyfried (both right) seem like a good combination on paper, they do not smoulder when they are thrown together, proving once again that movie chemistry is an elusive thing.

Pacing is also problematic. The movie feels flat for long stretches and potentially interesting plotlines – Will’s late father crossing paths with Leon, for instance – lead nowhere.

So, sadly, it takes too long before the film finally runs out of time.

(ST)