Running Commentary - In Time

 Once again, Jonny Prophet and I have watched a movie we've never seen before and typed out our thoughts during the viewing to produce one long, hopefully amusing but possibly incoherent stream of commentary. (Jonny's statements are italicized)

WARNING: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS

So here is In Time. Jonny Prophet and I kind of wanted to see this movie when it came out but never got around to it. Instead I scored a copy on Black Friday for $2.

Yes, Justin Timberlake has an extremely hot mom in this.

Justin Timberlake has a hot wife in reality. He tends to have hotness gravitate toward him.

I won’t deny that he’s a sexy man.

I am a bigger fan of his as an actor than a singer. So let’s push play.

So they are engineered to stop aging at 25, but only live another year unless they get more time. So it’s like a reverse Logan’s Run. The rich can live forever… great.

You know, they could have engineered them not to have to sleep. It kind of sucks to have to waste what little time you have in bed.

Weird, they can transfer time to each other by locking wrists.

Oh Johnny Galecki. You think Wallowitz is at the bar?

There’s the sexy and very gay Matt Bomer. Timberlake is scared Bomer’s going to get robbed being in such a sleazy bar.

Uh oh, it’s the USA Network police! They want Matt Bomer back! 

Why does everyone in the future dress as douche bags? And they all drive cars from 1975? What kind of future is this shit?

Timberlake is saving White Collar. You know, I think this is the reality where the shallow and conceited people from The Hills take over.

Yes. Though some of the chicks on that show were hot.

There are hot chicks in this world too! Think about it, the rich live forever and look young. Johnny Galecki dies young looking like a scruffy loser.

White Collar is apparently 105. Bomer says to be immortal, many must die. He explains how people are designed to die by raising taxes in the ghetto and stuff. He asks “Not everyone can live forever, where would we put them?”  I don't know, Mars?

Is this the Republican health plan?

Why genetically engineer everyone to live forever if you can’t deal with everyone living forever?

Why not just keep it as is where people age and die? Why not have it set up that you stop aging when you can afford it?

Because then we wouldn’t have this wacky plot.

Bomer asks what Timberlake would do with all the time he has. Start a boy band?

Watch Joey Fatone?

One flaw with this world is that everything looks run down because if everyone knows how little time they have left, they wouldn’t see the point in fixing things up… or house work.

So Bomer gives Dick in a Box all but 5 minutes of his time. Nice guy. Wonder what he’s up to now.

Bomer’s sitting on a bridge, his time is about to run out… and he’s dead. Falls into the river… ducks quack.

Ducks are evil. Alan Moore tells me so.

Yes and his track record for sanity is spotless.

This black woman keeps calling for Pharrell. Apparently that’s Johnny Galecki’s character. Sad. I thought Pharrell Williams was gonna come out.

So Johnny Galecki is married to a black woman. She’s cuter than Kaley Cuoco.

Plus, you don’t have to follow any stupid rules about dating her.

I miss you John Ritter.

We all do… Except ducks. 

Justin gives Pharrell a decade and says he’s like a brother. I don’t think Sheldon would have done that for Leonard.

Bus driver’s a dick. He told Justin’s hot mom she better run to get to her son because she didn’t have enough life left to ride.

This Hills world sucks!

You know who could help her? Dr. House.

Yes, or Kal Penn.

No, Kumar killed himself on the show.

His hot mom just timed out.

I wonder how Joey Fatone and his hot mom are doing in this world?

Cillian Murphy is a dick named Ray. He’s a cop known as a timekeeper.

So wait, a speedbump is all that keeps the poor out of the rich sector? Is this what I am led to believe?

New Greenwich sucks. They keep taking years off for every tollway time zone border.

I would just climb over the barricades. Why don’t the poor just do that?

We come to the rich area and all their windows and buildings are fixed. I get they would have to time to fix it, but I doubt they would have the skill to do so. Shouldn’t their part of town also be run down, but for different reasons?

So he’s out for vengeance over the death of his mom. Wouldn’t it make more sense for Dick in a Box to go after the asshole bus driver who refused to take his mother rather than try to take down the entire system? Baby steps… you have to build your way up!

There’s Amanda Seyfried.

He could tap that.

Yes, I believe Justin Timberlake could definitely tap Amanda Seyfried.

Cillian Murphy is hell bent on catching Timberlake. He should get a hobby… perhaps experimenting with fear inducing agents and making masks from burlap sacks.

Is Amanda Seyfried stalking him? I wish she would stalk me. That would be excellent

Oh, Justin Timberlake’s character is named Will. Just caught that and we’re only 30 minutes in! Not sure if that’s a good thing.

Hey, it’s Pete Campbell!

Wow, Vincent Kartheiser’s playing an asshole rich guy… I am shocked.

He’s tapping a Gilmore Girl. That’s happening.

Like right now, as we speak? That’s amazing. Do you think he’s a selfish lover like you?

Yes… yes he is.

Pete has been 25 for 85 years. He bet 50 years on a poker hand. Will called. Pete raised 2 centuries. Will called again. This is Celebrity Poker at its finest! Will won! (Surprise… or the movie would end abruptly.)

Pete says times used to be simpler… like getting hit in the face by Lane Pryce!

I miss Jared Harris on Mad Man.

Me too.

Amanda Seyfried is Pete’s daughter! She invites him to a party. Timberlake just bought a fancy car. He arrives to the party in it. Sounds like he already broke the clutch.

Pete introduces his daughters. “…and my daughter Sylvia. I believe you two have already met.”

Yeah, she’s been stalking me.

How many movies have the lead couple get to know each other through a slow dance?

Too many.

How many years do you think it took Cillian Murphy to buy that awesome coat?

5

No way!

Okay 10.

Will and Sylvia leave the party. Will decides to go for a swim in the ocean. Sylvia never swims in it.

Why? Are their robo-sharks? For the love of God, warn him about the robo-sharks!

Or the Joey Fatone sharks?

Ooooh! Those too!

Naked swimming! They go back to the party. Pete asks Will if he’s seen his daughter.

Yeah… all of her!

Oh snap! Cillian Murphy just showed up! He has Will in a separate room for interrogation.

Would you like to see my mask?

Cillian Murphy is a weird looking guy. Is that’s what he looks like at 25?  Ouch.

This world would really solve gambling problems. Instead of losing the car and house and screwing your family, you’d just die.

Scarecrow doesn’t believe that White Collar gave Will his time because he wanted to die. They took his time!  But Timberlake just went all Die Hard on everyone, grabbed Seyfried and drove away!

The police cars are like weird 70’s muscle cars that have digital lights and are painted silver.  Timberlake got away from the pursuing Murphy. 

Timberlake tells Seyfriend to hide her time or she’ll get killed.  Especially don’t show Harry Hamlin!

They drive over puncture strips and end up flipping down a cliff in the most conveniently safe crash ever! The trap was set by the ‘time bandits’ from the beginning. (See what I did there with Time Bandits? Terry Gilliam is awesome). They stole most of Sylvia’s time. Now she’s flipping out, but Will knows what to do. I’m guessing it involves Johnny Galecki.

So everyone drives 70’s cars and dresses like 30’s gangsters and acts like entitled douche bags. This world is confusing.

Change around the circumstances a little and this plot kind of resembles The Island.

A little.

Oh, Johnny Galecki’s dead.

Whenever they swap time, it sounds like a percolating coffee maker.

Anyway, Will’s plan to take down the system sucks as much as I thought it would. He’s trying to extort Scarecrow and Pete for a thousand years.

People seem to just drop dead everywhere in this world.

Yeah, you run out of time and drop dead.

Kind of inconvenient for everyone else.

Foreshadowing alert! Will shows Sylvia how his deceased father would “fight” for time and win. It’s like thumb wrestling, only with glowing numbers.

They tell what they were doing when their clock started. Will lost his breath on the street. Sylvia was awoken. She said she went to the mirror and saw what see would then look like for the rest of her life.

She saw a hot chick in the mirror. How terrible.

Pete’s a dick. He didn’t donate any of his time to the mission, not even for his daughter.

Damn you David Boreanez for bearing a son!

Huh?

Conner… from Angel.

Oh.

Sylvia calls her dad. Cillian Murphy is about to shoot Will, but Sylvia shoots Murphy instead. Then they get away in his cop car. Will gave Murphy time to be nice, but now he has to walk through the ghetto to get back to his men… with haters hatin’ the whole way.

Will decides to use the cop car to pull over someone and jack their minutes.  Man, first time out as a cop and the white boy has to harass a black guy? What the fuck, man?

So I guess time in the wrong hands can crash the market, according to someone talking to Pete Campbell. If he helps his daughter, Cillian Murphy’s gonna take him down.

Sylvia seems to really get off on shooting guns.

Ooh, Will and Sylvia busted into a bank and stole a ton of time from a vault. They invite the customers to grab all the time from the vault. Now Justin Timberlake is like the Robin Hood of time, giving out years to the poor.

I love how the gangsters are all British in what is clearly America.

Maybe there’s an exchange program.

Does that mean Snoop Dogg is in England? That’s awesome!

Uh ohs… Cillian Murphy is gonna ruin Justin Timberlake’s sexy time with Amanda Seyfried!

Man, Cillian Murphy is such a cock blocker!

You’d think this future world would have something better than guns and bullets to use.

Yeah, why don’t they have life minute zapping guns?

You know what’s weird about this future? They’re no animals. No dogs, cats, birds… not complaining about that last one. The poor sections don’t seem to have art either.

That makes sense. Bohemians don’t make bank, the poor need money to live.

The British gangster guy is killing people to find out Will and Sylvia’s location for the 10 Year reward. A guy agrees to help for a share of the reward.

You know he’s just going to screw you, dude!

Sylvia tells Will her life is so much better after meeting him. He replies that he’s almost gotten her killed a few times.

Best first date ever.

Man, he got cock blocked again! This time by the gangsters! Dude, one of the gangsters is Ben Stiller’s doppelganger. The lead gangster says he doesn’t like to kill a man in cold blood… really? You kind of did earlier… several times.

So Will is gonna “fight” British guy. Fighting is confusing. I don’t think it would really work. Will of course defeats the gangster and shoots his men.

Seems like the powers that be will just keep raising the cost of living to maintain power… gee, I could have told Will that. So he’s discouraged. Sylvia decides they should give up. She enters he father’s business and says to an army of armed guards that she will surrender, but only to her father. It was of course a ruse, as one of Pete’s guards was Will in disguise. They take him hostage and break into his vault. They steal his million years. Pete says they are only doing harm and only prolonging people’s agony.

This really is the Republican health care plan!

Pete says the same thing Bomer said in the beginning… to be immortal many must die. Will says no one should be immortal if even one person has to die. (very subtle message guys)

So Will and Sylvia charge their police car through a timekeeper barricade and then through a time border zone.

See? It’s obviously not hard to break through those!

Cillian Murphy finally catches them at gunpoint… but he lost track of how much time he had left. He dead.

Will made it back to Murphy’s cop car just in time to get a time transfer. He was able to catch Sylvia before her time ran out (sort of like with his mom, only happier).

The system is crashing from all the stolen time. And Will and Sylvia become the Bonnie and Clyde of time theft by hitting other banks to keep the system in collapse.

Final Thoughts

This wasn’t a bad movie, but I don’t think it was great. I think it devolved into the classic trap that many science fiction films with great premises fall into, which is to turn it into an action movie. Here you have Will, who just learned of the horrible plight of the common man, simply pick up a gun and fight the system… successfully. It’s the same sort of problems that The Adjustment Bureau had… people can just fight the all powerful system and win (in that instance with an assist from God… which for note if you write a story that requires God to save the your characters, you’ve failed. People don’t want to see movies where the all powerful God fixes everything.).

Okay, back on track here. What I noticed about In Time (which by the way, is a cheap cop-out of a title) is that for such an original concept and a unique world, the movie kept following clichés I have seen numerous times (i.e. a man and woman slow dancing while getting to know each other as a convenient means to save time, or a man and woman on the run from the system that they just found out is evil like in The Island or The Adjustment Bureau).

In the end, I think I would have preferred less Hollywood and more Twilight Zone in a way. (Please note: I think that The Twilight Zone was brilliant, one of the greatest television shows ever, way ahead of its time and has been a benchmark for all thought provoking science fiction ever since it aired.) I’ll use Inception as an example of a science fiction film with an original concept that, while brimming with action scenes, didn’t feel like one cliché after another. Plus, Inception had a brilliant ending that felt like it could have come straight out of the Twilight Zone.

In Time had a great cast, many of whom are proven actors and if the script had been a bit deeper, more personal and less “beautiful people with fast cars and guns,” it would have been an amazing film. That said, it was well worth the $2 I paid for it (God bless Black Friday sales!).