In a dystopic future, aging has been cured. When people turn 25, they stop getting any older. However, to stop overpopulation everyone has an artificial limit to their lifespans. Everyone has a green, glowy counter tattooed to their wrist, allowing them to see their life tick away before their eyes. When someone runs out of time, they fall over, dead. Time can be exchanged, and has replaced money as the effective currency of the world. Working-class people have to earn time every day just to keep themselves alive. Beggars walk the street, asking people for a minute. Robbers, referred to as "minutemen", literally steal people's lives in back alleys. In the rich parts of town, the privileged gamble away decades, have been 25 for hundreds of years, and have the same biological age as their own grandchildren.
If that isn't an awesome premise for a film, I have no idea what is! This is exactly what science fiction is supposed to be: talking about issues with our own world by using fantastic allegories. In this case, the subject is the increasing income gap. The poor get poorer and the rich get richer, and in this allegory, the poor have to literally give away their lives to pay the rent, or put food on the table.
In Time stars Justin Timberlake (who's actually a good actor, if you can be adult enough to not hate him because he was in a boy band) as Will Salas, a young manual labourer with a chip on his shoulder. Amanda Seyfried plays Sylvia Weis, the daughter of an immensely rich banker, bored with a life of dull safety. Cillian Murhpy is Reymond Leon, a zealous policeman tasked with making sure the time-system remains intact. However, the real star of the movie is the setting; real effort was put into communicating the sense of urgency people live in, and trying to change even the little details to fit the difference their ways of thinking and doing. Poor people do things fast, and mostly run from place to place, while the rich have time to spare. Likewise, those who are low on time tend to wear clothes that make it convenient to check their wrists almost twice a minute, while those who don't need to worry keep their arms covered. My favourite little touch is that killing someone by stealing away all their time is referred to as "cleaning their clock".
The actual plot is not quite as good as the premise would promise, however. In Time is all about raging for this very real issue, but at times it gets dangerously close to becoming a power fantasy: "Will Salas is the man who can fix everything, because he knows what's right and he's got the balls to do it!" The protagonist's solutions are actually pretty simple, but we're left to assume nobody else has ever tried them before. The film does question whether one man can change anything several times, but in the end seems to ignore all that. It's not quite as extreme as Surrogates (which was about people living out their lives with robotic bodies so they never have to leave their rooms), where the end had Bruce Willis shut everything down and the implication is that everything worked out fine, but I could have used a more subtle resolution nonetheless.
Though In Time is an action movie, its action mostly focuses on chases, whether they be on foot or in cars. Most of it is well-executed, except for one really fake-looking CGI car in a crash scene. It may bug you that nobody uses any future-weaponry, or has a flying car, but in truth such details would only have distracted from the main gimmick of the setting.
I don't have much else to say. Mostly, In Time is just a pretty good movie with pretty good acting, pretty good action and a pretty good script. To me, it's the imaginative premise that elevates it to something special. It's a fine way to spend 100 minutes of your precious time, if you've got any to spare, but becomes a must-see if you're into that sort of thing. Director/writer Andrew Niccol already had my approval from his masterpiece Lord of War, and I now look forward to seeing his future projects as well.
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