I can just imagine that the writers of this film had so much fun. Someone came to them and said, “we have a futuristic film, where people have digital clocks on their arms, which counts down to zero and if it hits zero they die. What should we call it?” to which the dumbest guy in the room says – after everyone else has blurted out every saying that we say today with the word “time” involved – “IN TIME!”. While reading over this abomination someone who resides on a floor high enough to do whatever he wants with his time, let’s see how many times (see what I did there) I can use the word time in this review, was mulling over how he could get this movie to be made and, more importantly, make money. He turns on his TV to VH1 and saw an old N’Sync video with Justin Timberlake doing the 80s clock tower dance move – I’m not actually sure if that video exists – and played pretty girl roulette by casting Amanda Seyfried and rolled the dice.

I honestly think that the above paragraph should serve as the plot synopsis for the film In Time, mainly because In Time is a film with almost no plot. The film introduces a societal change that has occurred, the added importance of time, and pretty much given nothing else about the movie any thought. Almost no action that either of the protagonists do throughout the plot of the film make any sense other than for an excuse for pretty people to be amazing and be in the same scene together.

The film wants to be an allegory for our current society and the difference between the rich and poor, or in this version those with time and those without it. However, by doing that it doesn’t really achieve anything by failing to give us a crucial element of a good story: a reason to keep moving forward. We can just take the first fifteen to twenty minutes as an excuse to get the ball rolling and to eventually put Will (Justin Timberlake) and Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried) together and on the run so as to try and give both characters a sense of fulfilment.

The problem with that idea is that we then are given the character of Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy), the timekeeper (aka. cop), that’s pretty much a bumbling fool who’s either incompetent or incapable of thinking like a truly smart cop, which is what the movie wants us to think he is from how quickly he can assess a scene but fails to allow him to use that brilliance on how to assess a person. He exists just so twice in the film we can have a “close call” that’s actually never close at all since there’s never a sense of danger for Will or Sylvia. The film’s initial idea makes time the real villain – just like how money is the root of all evil in the real world – but we need to make the big bad corporations and the timekeepers bad guys, and bad ones at that, as well.

I’d almost like to put this film up against the current day events of #OccupyWallStreet, but that would be giving the film way too much credit.

With that said though I believe the film’s most egregious crime of all is deciding to shoe-horn in a sloppy Bonnie and Clyde & Robin Hood storyline where Will and Sylvia feel this need to become bank robbers that give time away to the poor. I’m not saying that other films haven’t made this error as well and not walked away with it worse for wear, but In Time just felt beyond contrived. The film felt like it was pushing itself to a resolution that itself didn’t care for except to fill its two hour quota and waste even more of its audience’s time that we can never have back.

Rating: 2.0/10