A Movie Review: In Time (2011)

In Time (2011)
Director - Andrew Niccol
PG-13; 109 Min
Cast
Justin Timberlake - Will Salas
Amanda Seyfried - Sylvia Weis
Cillian Murphy - Raymond (Timekeeper)

For those of you who go to movies because of a hot actress, you can do a lot worse than an Amanda Seyfried movie of late.  The girl is just straight smoking hot.  Her body of work is actually quite impressive, more so her actual body, but still a few decent films along the way.

Let's take a few seconds to examine this actress:

Unfortunately for us the movie is PG-13 and it plays out exactly like a PG-13 movie in terms of wasting such young talent, but I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of her in the future, with fingers crossed. She's actually not a terrible actress for the type of films she takes either...

Ok, so the movie In Time takes a look at a world where everyone is essentially given a 1 year death sentence when they turn 25 via a genetic countdown timer in their arm.  With time being so valuable it has now become the only currency, with people exchanging time for good and services and also people being robbed and murdered for their time.  As long as you are able to add time to your clock you live on, but once your time runs out, so do you.

As you can imagine, the movie is filled with cliches and ridiculous lines - "Do you come from time?" the wealthy heiress Sylvia (Seyfried) asks the new-comer Will (Timerblake) to the affluent Greenwich, a city that clearly denotes all the wealth and uppity people, whereas Will comes from a distant time zone ghetto.  It gets a little old a little quickly to hear these lines, but the concept is decent enough to get you through without walking out.  My main complaint with the world is just how easy it is to transfer time between people.  I mean, you simply lock arms and if you turn one way you gain someone's time... seems a little silly that a genetic code put into humans would be allowed to be manipulated so easily.

I don't have much more to say, or, rather, I don't want to spend much more time.  This is Justin Timberlake so, yeah, it is what it is, but the bright spot int he film is probably the Timekeeper played by Cillian Murphy who, though he himself is never given enough depth, is deeper than the rest of the cast.  It is of course a silly film with chases and unbelievable story lines involving rich people who can't die but take no risks either and poor people who do whatever they have to in order to survive... Somewhere in here there is a good story and in a sense, it was last year's film Never Let Me Go (2010) which was a pretty good film with Carrie Mulligan that explored a world in which children are raised for the sole purpose to have their organs harvested at a young age.

This wasn't a terrible time at the movies, but it is definitely a time-killer.

*** out of 5