I wasn’t that interested in the movie In Time when I saw the commercials and previews. Strangely enough, it took a lawsuit by Harlan Ellison to get me interested. Ellison claimed that it was based off his classic story Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman. But the lawsuit was dropped after Ellison saw the movie. After watching the movie over the weekend, my guess is that he didn’t want his name on this soulless disappointing movie regardless if it was ripping him off. So, let’s see what went wrong with the movie.

The movie is set in some unknown future where people drive cars from the 1970s and do manual labor that was replaced by robots around that time as well. The basic setup is that everybody ages normally until age 25. Then, a LED clock in their arm starts counting down. They get 1 year to live after that and when the timer counts down to zero, they die. They earn more time by working and have to spend time to buy things. Also, we find out that if you want to cross time zones you need to pay large tolls to enter the nicer zones. The nicest zone is called Greenwich (get it, Greenwich time) and the people who live there generally have centuries on their timers. The poor people usually have a couple days. There are electronic times that can take away or add time to people or people can share time by grasping arms.

The poor are is where Will Salas (Justin Timberlake). Will works with his buddy Borel (Johnny Galecki) and helps out his mom (Olivia Wilde) as much as he can. One night, Will and Borel are in the local dive bar where Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer) is buying for everyone as he has a century on his timer. The local gang comes in to steal the time, but Will gets him out and hides him for the night. In the morning, Henry wakes up first, gives Will most of his time and then sits on a bridge waiting for his time to run out. Will tries to save him, but is too late. And then Will’s mom gets caught up in inflation and dies before Will can give her some time. So, Will decides to go to the rich area of town.

While in Greenwich, Will wins a lot of time by playing poker against Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser) and starts a flirtation with Philippe’s daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried). Together they decide to rebel against the system and take it down.

I had a number of problems with this movie. I’ll skip over the lack of technology (since I could see the poor folks not being able to afford it). I’ll even skip over the main ideas, since, while they weren’t perfect, the ideas were at least interesting. But, let’s start with some basic problems. Are there no hackers in this world? I can understand why the rich folks want more time, but I still had no clue why the system ever started? It doesn’t look like overpopulation is an issue, so why was the time set at 1 year after age 25? Philippe’s company had something to do with the timekeeping, but it’s never made clear what it does, even when it starts affecting the plot. It’s almost as if someone wrote a cool first draft with a lot of great ideas, then someone came along to turn it into a standard summer action flick and left only a few threads from the basic ideas. The characters were pretty flat and we rarely have any idea why a character did what they did. The characters seemed to be as surprised by what the did as the viewers were.

Overall, the movie was mediocre at best and it’s only the great ideas that bring it up to that level. There is a good movie to be made from those ideas, but this wasn’t it. Not recommended.