For a few to be immortal, many must die.

In Time

(2011)

Harlan Ellison decided that this had ripped off a short story of his when he saw the trailer. Then he saw the film and decided not to sue. The set-up is fairly high concept; you stop aging at 25, genetically engineered to live only one more year. But you can buy more time, so it proves an effective way of keeping the rich long-lived and the poor dead, or poor.

For the first 45 minutes Andrew Niccol's film is quite engaging, setting up a world where goods are paid for by reducing one's lifespan and zones separate the rich from the poor (it costs a year to enter the richest zone). But then it drifts off into a lacklustre Bonnie and Clyde, wasting the premise.

I've found most of Niccol's work a bit of a letdown (Gattaca, Lord of War, his script for The Truman Show); he seems to hold up a flag waving intellectual colours and promoting food for thought, but then doesn't think through his ideas adequately in order to come up with a sufficiently challenging or provocative result. Justin Timberlake and Amanda Siegfried are merely adequate in the lead roles. There's better work from the supporting cast (Cillian Murphy and the ever-petulant Vincent Kartheiser.

**1/2

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