On the couch

If In Time could’ve maintained the pace of its trailer and the intrigue and promise of its first third it could well have become one of my favourite sci-fi flicks of the last couple of years.
Starring Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried and Cillian Murphy, the concept is simple, brilliant and not just a little bit silly – it proposes that at some point in the future genetic engineering has conquered aging, halting the process at 25. Once the quarter century is hit the forearm timer that everyone is born with starts to count down. You get one year to live or, given it’s replaced money as the primary means to pay for goods and services, to spend on food, drink, rent and anything else that takes your fancy.
If you’re rich you can, in theory, live forever, looking as good as you did at the prime of your youth. If you’re poor – and most people are – you’ll probably have about enough time to make it through your day. Run to work, do your job and hope you get paid sufficient minutes and hours to do it all again tomorrow.
Timberlake stars as Will Salas, a young fella living in the slums just doing enough to get by. He helps his mam (Olivia Wilde) make the rent and has time to give the local street urchin a spare five minutes. So when he spies somebody in his local dive flashing over a hundred years about on their arm he does the honourable thing and warns them to get the hell out before they get bopped over the head and have every last second swiped.
A chase, a bit of philosophising and a snooze later sees the mysterious lifed-up stranger giving JT all his time and then taking a header off a bridge. Guess who’s going to get the blame for that then?
Will uses his newfound wealth to get the hell out of the ghetto (travel between different zones is only possible through the deposit of increasingly large quantities of time) and he heads to New Greenwich to see how the other half live and, if possible, ruffle a few complacent feathers.
It’s here that the story takes both off and a nose dive. Getting involved with Sylvia (Seyfried),  daughter of a super-rich financier (he’s got eons in the bank), Will also comes to the attention of timekeeper (basically a cop) Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy). After a good set-up the story shifts into a chase movie and starts throwing more cheesy dialogue and plot threads at a dizzying pace.
While the cheese is not a good thing in any circumstance, the under-explored concepts is frustrating and unfortunate given a bunch of them are really interesting. Will’s dad, for example, is hinted at being a Che Guevara type character whose real history Salas seems ignorant of. There’s also the vague social commentary – is time money or money time? Where’s it coming from and who’s getting screwed to ensure its supply? Does the fear of accidental death that plagues the super-rich make them risk averse to the point of paralysis?
Instead the scattergun approach is taken and sense is abandoned in favour of letting Timberlake and Seyfried – neither of whom are unpleasant to watch act or just stand around looking pretty – suck face and lurch from one escape scene to the next.
As time cop Leon, Cillian Murphy is his typically watchable self (although seeing him as one of the older faces in the cast is weird) while Vincent Kartheiser (oily little snit Pete Campbell in Mad Men) is underused as the dodgy, mega-rich daddy.
While disappointing, In Time isn’t a terrible flick by any measure. Just don’t approach it with your hopes up because to do so would just be a waste of your… Never mind.
Ever before the cameras started rolling on The Debt, John Madden’s time-hopping Nazi-hunting spy drama, had a lot going for it. Any time you put Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson in front of the camera you’re already on to a good thing. Top that off with the (relatively) youthful talents of Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington and Ciarán Hinds and you’re cooking with gas.
Flitting between the past and psresent, Chastain, Worthington and Hinds play a trio of Mossad agents tasked with kidnapping a former war criminal and returning him to Israel for public trial. The mission’s complicated fallout plays out both in its immediate aftermath and over 30 years later at the launch of a book honouring the three.
To say anything more would be to ruin the story and strip away a lot of the tension. Suffice it to say, however, that nothing is as it seems and the best laid plans yadda, yadda, yadda.
While things meander a little toward the end and the denouement is slightly unsatisfactory, any possible complaints pale in comparison to seeing some fine performances bring a fascinating, thrilling and sometimes disturbing story to life.