REVIEW: In Time (dir. Niccol)

In Time has such a rich premise — a future in which the poor run out of time at 25, and the rich stay 25 forever — that it is at least 20 minutes before you notice it's as dead as a Dodo. The film was written and directed by Andrew Niccol, whose fascination with fake utopias (he directed Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show) here furnishes him with a world divided, as has been traditional since the time of H G Wells, into the Haves and the Have Nots, with the Have Nots haggling for extra time via a device on their wrist — 'Got a minute?" ask the beggars on the street — and the Haves swanning around tony mansions, looking beautiful and 25 forever. Time is quite literally money. It looks like the longest credit card commercial you ever saw, the styling at its densest in the exquisite, paradisal form of Amanda Seyfried, wearing a Louise Brooks bob and Le Louboutin heels, in which she teeters heroically, like a refugee model, while fleeing the film's villains. There are three of them — a blonde one, a dark one, and Pete from Mad Men — all showing up for chases duties on a rotation scheme. They are first sign that the film is losing forward puff, the clincher being a plot that, for lack of anything better to do, devolves into an attempt to Overturn the Order of Things — viva la revolucion! — in order to get back to the pre-lapserian state we all enjoyed before the movie's writers came up with their bright idea in the first place. Never trust a movie whose second half basically entails undoing it's first. It's like someone arriving at a party with the announcement they're leaving — the conversation can't settle. Which is a shame because the first half has a nicely concealed satirical sting, at its sharpest in the scene where Timberlake, being shown his table in a fancy restaurant, is gently corrected by a waitress: she can tell he's ghetto, because he does everything so quickly. I'd never thought about this before but but's true: rich lives run slower, although they affect rush as a way of appearing not too ostentatiously idle. Much like In Time, in fact, which does a perfect impersonation of action-movie kinetics without proceeding an inch. C-