Andrew Niccol has run out of great ideas. From the Philip K. Dick assisted The Truman Show (1998) to his own projects as director, including the clinical Gattaca (1997) and the underrated S1m0ne (2002) in which he glimpsed a future Hollywood where the real stars are hologramic projections, Niccol’s mind has been fertile ground for clever, thought-provoking ideas.
His latest film, In Time (2011), posits a future in which humans, in theory, are given a single year to live beyond the age of 25. At this point a digital readout, genetically burned into every human forearm, begins to count down but the inevitable can be delayed according to your ability to ‘earn’ time credits or barter for more.
Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) is an ordinary factory worker whose seemingly unmotivated altruism saves a ‘time-rich’ man from death, only to have this wealth gifted to him as they nap whilst hiding out from the bad guys. After a semi-interesting set-up, Salas is forced into defensive action once he enters the forbidden zone (where the wealthy reside) and takes the rich daughter, Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried), of a mega-rich baron, Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser), on the lam. Simultaneously, an icy-bland Timekeeper (a creatively neutered Cillian Murphy) is set on Salas’s tail for the suspected large-scale time-theft.
Niccol’s film is fashioned around a series of metaphors that coolly reflect our forbidding world with all its social and moral divides through the prism of a futuristic context. But budgetary restraints and a lack of punchy originality have cruelled Niccol’s pursuit for creditable social and political commentary, there’s nothing remotely futuristic about the locales and the cast is made up of second-rate talent, especially lead female, the perennially vapid Seyfried, the only hope of salvation with regard to her character would have been a final twist that revealed her as having been an android all along.
A series of silly moments negate the relative competency of Timberlake as a low-grade action star, like that of Salas and his mother (Olivia Wilde) desperately racing towards one another as her remaining seconds count down to an absurd leap into one another’s arms. Perhaps we’ll reflect on In Time as a bump in the road for Niccol who ultimately must accept culpability for his film’s bland mediocrity; it’s certainly not awful but neither am I able to raise a murmur of recommendation.
I say:
Not a chore to sit through, but squanders its one good idea to a lost cause.
See it for:
The pulsating futuristic set-design? The stellar performances? The exotic magnetism of Amanda Seyfried? Exactly none of the above.
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