In Time

A great concept is botched by heavy-handed metaphors and a pun-loaded script. Th film fails to capitalise on some strong ideas and is instead content to smugly lord it over the audience as if it has something important to say.

The hype...
Andrew Niccol writes and directs a sci-fi tale we hope will match his earlier hit 'Gattaca', despite sounding ominously like a 'Logan's Run' knock-off. Justin Timberlake headlines with a great supporting cast that includes Cillian Murphy and the always-watchable Olivia Wilde.

The story...
In the not-so-distant future, time itself has become a global commodity. Every person who reaches the age of 25 is given one more year to live out, with additional time having to be earned, or taken, to survive.

Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) finds himself in possession of all the time he can handle when a mysterious stranger escapes from a local gangster (Alex Pettyfer) and passes on over a century of life. Eager to experience the high-life, and motivated by a recent tragedy, Will heads to New Greenwich, the affluent part of town.

The authorities are soon alerted, and a keen Timekeeper (Cillian Murphy) is charged with bringing in the new face in town, forcing Will to kidnap Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), the daughter of a powerful businessman who essentially controls time.

Will wants to upset the establishment and bring down the system that has lead to the rich living longer and the poor working themselves to an early grave. Oh, we see what they did there... it's like today only not.

The breakdown...
This could probably end up being a fun watch at home, if you play the 'In Time' drinking game. Take a shot every time a character makes a time-based pun and you'll be hammered within the first five minutes.

The action is set in a future where everything will look pretty much as it does now but where every other word will be replaced by 'time'. The message that 'time is money' is so relentlessly delivered, and in such a clunky way, that it becomes impossible to care.

Timberlake is fine, proving that he's a reliable screen presence. And even Oscar-winning actors have one or two misfires in their back-catalogue, so it would be harsh to blame him for this movie. Instead the blame must lie with Andrew Niccol, whose script is a mess of contradictions and whose directing style relies on identical-looking sets for numerous sequences.

For a film that feels over long, one of the more surprising problems is the rushed nature of some of the best ideas. Sometimes this approach works, like the startling moment when Timberlake embraces his mother, played by the equally youthful-looking Olivia Wilde, but elsewhere some characters lack believability.

Cillian Murphy's Timekeeper could have done with at least some credible motivation, and the sole reason Amanda Seyfried's Sylvia appears in certain scenes is so that we can see her totter around in fetish footwear.

As a pure sci-fi idea, 'In Time' isn't even original, but worse, as a film, it's utterly derivative of several, better, genre favourites.

The verdict...
It's actually quite a timely story, taking on corrupt Capitalist regimes and the impending global population crisis, but it's let down by the hammy dialogue that regularly kills any momentum.

Rating: 2/5

'In Time' is released in the UK on 1 November. Certificate: 12A.