‘In Time’ runs out

In theaters Friday: Bully, Goon, Mirror Mirror, Wrath of the Titans

New on Blu-ray/DVD: A Dangerous Method, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Time is money.

The vast implications of taking this classic idiom dead seriously are the subject of a new thriller from GATTACA and Lord of War director Andrew Niccol, the filmmaker who is shooting The Host in Baton Rouge right now.

Set in the near future, In Time displays a world where humans are engineered to stop aging at 25. Good looks aside, the catch is that once a person reaches 25, he only has one calendar year to live. Time can run short considering no currency exists except for the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds tallied digitally on each person’s forearm. Want coffee? That’s be six hours, please. A burger, that’ll be 10. And so on.

The populace is divided among time zones according to wealth and lifespan, which are one in the same. The rich, including Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser who plays the wealthiest of the bunch with more than a million years saved up, live in a Madison Avenue-like paradise, while the poor live minute-to-minute in the ghettos.

Justin Timberlake stars as a poor man from the slums who gets a second chance thanks to a rich man who has lived more than a few lifetimes gives him more than 100 years of life before committing suicide.

Like an imposter crashing a masquerade ball, Timberlake crosses time zones with his new “cash,” to taste of the sweeter life and, ultimately, bring the entire system crashing down. “No man should live forever if even one man has to die because of it,” he says like a crusader for the underclass. For a film with this heady conceit, the translation is: “No man should be rich if even one man has to be poor because of it.”

Tracking Timberlake and all the new time he has on his hands is a steely-nerved detective, called a “timekeeper,” played by the great Cillian Murphy, and the ghetto’s reigning gangster, a posh-talking Alex Pettyfer, who helps the Big Brother-like authorities by keeping the poor folks poor and quarantined in the slums through intimidation and theft.

Niccol does an admirable job of condensing weighty ideas and motifs into an accessible 90-minute action film, the problem is that these ideas, each of which could buttress their own film, feel too shallowly explored in this shoot ‘em style. A slightly slower and moodier think piece (think Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey) would have allowed the idea of earning enough to live an eternity on Earth or the decision-making necessary to choose among commodities or necessities when life is at stake could have been explored in a more emotionally satisfying way.

Still, Timberlake’s performance is a decent enough heroic foil to Kartheiser’s devil in disguise, and Amanda Seyfried’s spoiled girl-gone-bad brings an unpredictable air to this Logan’s Run chase to make it worth seeing. In Time wants to be high-brow, but it is not. It’s simply one of the more unique action thrillers you’ll find on DVD this year.