Amanda Seyfried, as a red-haired heiress, catches Justin Timberlake’s eye in “In Time.” (20th Century Fox Licensing/Merch)
Bad movies don’t get much more fascinating or culturally relevant than “In Time,” a dystopian allegory with much on its mind and all of it wrong. Bonus: It could have been made especially to lure the Occupy Wall Street crowd away to the movies long enough to allow the patchouli and organic bean curd to be hosed off their tents.
This futuristic thriller — “Logan’s Run” meets “All the President’s Men” starring Patty Hearst, written as a brainless rejoinder to Joe the Plumber — strikes me as kindergarten Karl Marx, but then what was Karl but a 5-year-old with an expansive vocabulary? It took him 600 pages to say: You have more stuff than me. Gimme some.
Justin Timberlake is likable enough as a working-class dude from the ghetto named (I love this part) “Dayton,” though it looks exactly like LA. Time is money: When you hit 25, you stop getting older, but your clock also starts counting down from 365 days. You can give time to others or add to it by earning. If you hit zero, you die. So you work to earn more time, but hyperinflation (coffee costs four minutes today, though it was three minutes yesterday) means ordinary folk can never get ahead — they rarely have more than 24 hours on the clock.
Everyone’s numbers are visible as countdown meters shown digitally on their forearms, to create a parallel with Holocaust victims that is just as spurious as everything else here.
The plutocrats, who live in (no points for imagination here, fellas) “New Greenwich,” have hundreds or even thousands of years saved up. Naturally, Will (Timberlake) will play Robin Hood to even things out.
This is an economics thriller that flunks on both macro and micro levels. Will and a rich guy’s daughter (Amanda Seyfried) he kidnaps for ransom crash a car head-first off a 100-foot overpass into solid concrete, only to walk away without even taking an aspirin.
And in forearm-wrestling matches (whoever keeps his arm on top sucks time away from the loser), Will’s strategy is simply to wait for the other guy to glance down at Will’s arm. This distraction somehow instantly makes Will stronger, so he wins every time, so … why is he always broke?
When the movie isn’t delivering labored, time-related wordplay (“Follow the time” instead of the money) and ridiculous chases, it’s spouting “Das Kapital” bromides. The New Greenwichians are successful financiers, ergo they must have cheated. “Is it stealing if it’s already stolen?” asks Seyfried, who goes all Patty Hearst as the pair of them start robbing banks. (Too bad the title “Time Bandits” was already taken.)
Chunks of time (which look like Atari video-game cartridges from 1978 that have been dipped in aluminum) sit barely guarded in vaults that can be breached simply by driving a truck into them.
The movie (written and directed by Andrew Niccol, who wrote “The Truman Show”) assumes that behind every great fortune lies a great crime, yet the most massive injustice we see is when a time cop played by Cillian Murphy convicts and punishes Will for time theft, with no evidence. In fact, Will has come by his time-stash legitimately, yet the cop seizes almost all of Will’s time on the spot without trial. The movie thinks it’s about abuse of capitalism, but it’s more about abuse of authority, and of logic.
The allegory nullifies itself in inviting comparison to reality. Life is more egalitarian than it is in this movie, because while rich people may have more toys, their wealth doesn’t buy them the most precious resource. Warren Buffett won’t outlive his secretary by centuries.
At the end, “In Time” thinks it’s being very up-to-date when it suggests a major stimulus/redistribution program would make the workers of the world rise up against private industry. This future looks awfully passé: The stimulus didn’t work out. Neither did 1917 Russia.