Not sure what it wants to be, In Time seems to have put 24,000 one-sentence ideas on slips of paper into a large hat, then drew out about a dozen slips and created a storyline. They started out by aping Logan’s Run (1976) then mixed in Minority Report, any version of Robin Hood and any film with Barney the Dinosaur. Justin Timberlake plays Barney.
In the not too distant future, there is no money. Instead, time units have taken it’s place. A genetic medical process has people stop aging at 25. But (and this is a big but), you get to live one more year…….then at 26 you keel over and go from bad acting to cadaver unit. How does your body know when your time is up? Everybody has a glowing green count down clock in one of their arms. This causes great alarm especially when your time is in its last few seconds. Only those running out of time on April 14 get the last laugh as they now don’t have to deal with their tax returns for the prior year.
The glowing time clock can be extended by getting more time credit or a donation from another person. This is how everything is paid for. To augment this stupid idea, poor vs. middle vs. rich live in different time zones, with poor people laboring to earn a few minutes, while the rich pile up eons and eons of time, kept in a small machine in a safe. It is betterto be in the rich time zone than the poor time zone. Trust me.
JT and his mom live in the poor time zone. Her time runs out when she fails to catch a bus and she drops dead on the street. JT is very upset. He decides to go to the rich time zone and clean out the rich time holders and redistribute the time to the poor time’s-almost-up group. This entails lots of running around, shooting, car crashes and time transfers. You can transfer time by touching your wrist to another person. We know this works as there is a sound like a flat tire on the freeway during the transfer. There is also a large clunking sound when time is up and the body is down.
Eventually JT teams up with a time-rich guy’s daughter and they rob time banks and donate the time to the time challenged folks in the poor zone.
I passed up a perfectly good computer generated film called Puss in Boots in order to check out In Time. I felt like I spent two hours in a pile of over-used kitty litter.
Rated 1.0 out of 4.0 measures indicating Waste of Time. Which is rumored to be the title of the sequel. M. Night Shyamalan has agreed to write and direct.
