Fifty-two. According to Metacritic.com, 52/100 is the average review of every film featuring Justin Timberlake. It’s not great, and without a certain lucky break landing an Oscar-nominated role in The Social Network (I’ve heard Timberlake actually begged for that role), his score would be six points lower. But remember, this is the average score for the movies starring dear Justin, not scores reflecting the skills of the actor himself. So the question remains: is the best that N*SYNC had to offer the cause of these middling movie reviews or a victim of bad scripts?
I have neither the time nor the tenacity to wade through the body of JT’s work, which ranges from unwatchable, to mediocre, to The Social Network. I have no interest in seeing any rom-com which features the concept of “friends with benefits” (let alone a movie titled after the cliché), and I hope to never subject myself in any way to The Love Guru. However, Justin’s latest movie In Time falls under the umbrella of dystopian science fiction (the awesome-est of genres) and features the ’90s pop star in a rare dramatic role.
The movie takes place in the future (evident by the shiny, round-edged cars) where time is the currency. Humans have been genetically altered through the power of future science to have glowing digital clocks imprinted on their left arms, which begin to count down from one year until the clock runs out at age twenty-five.
Time is used as money (“Four minutes for a cup of coffee?!”), and when your time runs out, you die. Just as time can be spent, it can also be earned, either through hard work, gambling or theft. And if you can earn time in greater multitudes than you can spend it, you could live forever.
The concept of this movie is undoubtedly awesome, so I should have liked it. Not only does one literally wear his wealth on his sleeve, but that wealth is directly tied to one’s life span. The countdown concept makes for some truly tense moments as the audience watches some of the characters approach death.
In Time is Logan’s Run meets capitalism, and it could have made for an interesting political or economic commentary. But instead, the film stretches its concept thinly over the dull familiar beats of a mediocre action flick, squandering all its potential by pandering to the American mass market. It takes some hard swings at Wall Street, but any attempts at true political commentary feel awkward and obvious when placed in between car chases and bank robberies.
So, in this case, Justin had the script working against him. Did he rise above? Did he transcend his Marky-Mark roots and rise toward the Oscar-nominated Mark Wahlberg? No, he did not. I apologize if you believe that Timberlake can do it all, because he cannot be an action star.
He tries. His head is shaved à la Jason Statham, and he has the appropriate amount of Bruce Willis stubble. But every time he opens his mouth and attempts to deliver a line with any sort of weight or roughness, his entire image is deflated.
JT plays a character named Will Salas: a working class average Joe, living on hours at a time to support his mom, played by Olivia Wilde, because in this universe people don’t age past twenty-five.
There’s only one moment when Timberlake manages to seem entirely badass — he shoots three people in rapid succession — but as soon as he speaks, the illusion is broken and his boy band past glares through his tough-guy impression.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Timberlake is a terrible actor. He’s surprisingly good at being funny, and the rom-com genre fits him like a glove, but giving the lead to Justin Timberlake in a movie like this is almost as bad as giving Robert Pattinson the lead in The Fifth Element.
It should be restated that the poor casting of Justin Timberlake as a working-class badass was not the downfall of this movie. In Time was doomed to mediocrity as soon as writer/director Andrew Nicol decided to start writing the script right after he watched Transformers with MSNBC on in the background.
As the movie progresses, it obscures its intriguing core with jumbled clichés from a variety of action movie standards, and then attempts to tack on a bullshit condemnation of capitalism. Early in the movie, someone close to Will dies, and Justin kneels down and screams to the sky with all the watery angst he can muster. He then blames the upper class (when it’s really just the fault of a bus driver) and decides that the rich need to be punished.
He makes his way to the New Greenwich “time zone,” where the wealthiest in the land reside. Here he meets his inevitably hot female counterpart in the form of Sylvia Weis (played by Amanda Seyfreid), the sheltered daughter of the richest man in New Greenwich, who is a bank owner, and thus evil.
Will and Sylvia then run off together to do all those things that poor people know how to do but rich people don’t, like shooting guns and swimming in the ocean. At some point they start robbing banks because “it’s not stealing if it’s already been stolen.” The movie then turns into a mix between a bank heist and Robin Hood, except instead of the elaborate planning and scheming involved in movies like Ocean’s 11 or Inside Man, all you need to rob a future bank is a big truck capable of smashing through walls.
My biggest problem with the film is that the motivation for each of these characters makes no sense. The phrase about stealing is repeated multiple times throughout the film, suggesting that the rich in the movie (and potentially the wealthy of America) only became so through crime and corruption, even though In Time presents no evidence to back that up, except for maybe a random throwaway line about how the government uses time taxes to reduce population.
There’s a second phrase which is also repeated: “Many must die in order for few to be immortal,” a reference to the idea that the rich are prospering at the direct suffering of the poor, which is entirely unsubstantiated. Its solution to the economic inequality seems to resemble pure anarchy, in which everyone is free to steal as much time (money) as they want.
This movie could have been brilliant sci-fi if it spent more time exploring its fascinating concept. Instead, it settles for throwing around at least two dozen time-related puns and falling back on tropes of modern day action movies.
