Movie reviews
Seconds, minutes and hours have become the currency in a futuristic world in which human beings are genetically engineered to die at the age of 25. Naturally, those with power can buy themselves a few extra years, or even centuries, whereas ghetto-dweller Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) scrabbles to get by on a daily basis. A stroke of good fortune propels Will into the exclusive world of the time-rich, but his conscience won’t let him enjoy the luxury. Determined to avenge the untimely and unnecessary death of his mother (Olivia Wilde), Will takes a hostage, heiress Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried); on discovering that Sylvia is as appalled by the system as he is, Will embarks on a Robin Hood-style mission to loot the world’s time and disburse it to the poor. Niccol, who wrote The Truman Show, is here tapping into the disaffection caused by the global financial crisis, but while the concept is initially intriguing in the way it crystallises the injustice of the super-rich living for centuries at the expense of the poor, the story itself is little more than a third-rate version of Bonnie and Clyde. It need hardly be said that Timberlake and Seyfried are no Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, but the real disappointment is in Niccol’s hackneyed script, which appears designed to maximise the leading pair’s aura of cool at the expense of plausibility and audience empathy. Timberlake provides a likeable presence, and gets good support from Cillian Murphy as the cop determined to stop the bank-robbing spree, but overall In Time is much less than the sum of its parts.
STRAW DOGS (18s) is a remake of Sam Peckinpah’s controversial revenge fantasy from 1971, although Rod Lurie’s version is a more straightforward account of how two city slickers, David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth), come to be terrorised by rednecks when the couple move from LA to Amy’s hometown in Mississippi. Lurie does a fine job of ramping up the tension from the very start, when Amy and David encounter Amy’s apparently genial ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgård) in a bar, and the town’s alcoholic ex-football coach (James Woods) cuts loose in a show of psychotic posturing. In fact, the first hour is a neatly detailed account of how David tries his best to integrate with Amy’s former friends, even as the atmosphere thickens and grows poisonous. The final third of the movie is something of a disappointment, however, when a gang of locals besiege the couple in their home, and mild-mannered liberal David reveals himself as barbaric a savage as those he secretly despises. While the violence is as brutal as you might expect, there’s a perfunctory feel to it, as if Lurie expects the blood-letting to do all the hard work for him. Nonetheless, fine performances across the board make Straw Dogs compelling viewing, with Skarsgård in particularly eye-catching form.
