This Means War (2012)

by Steve Habrat

Love is a battlefield, a clammy, sexy, battlefield according to director McG, the hot shot, second rate Michael Bay. This Means War is a film overly concerned with a sexy appearance and frankly, not much more. McG, the director of such sugary blockbusters like Terminator: Salvation and Charlie’s Angles, is only interested with the outer shell of his products, sacrificing story and even moments of coherence just to nab a shot of Reese Witherspoon’s bottom to drive the male audience wild or twist Tom Hardy or Chris Pine into the proper pose to take the female audience’s breath away. For a film as shallow as This Means War, there are sporadic moments of hilarity and fizzy chemistry between the three stars that almost make up for a one-note script, half-hearted message about love, and a sub plot that is almost entirely forgotten by the people behind the camera. Oh well, at least it looks good!

This Means War introduces us to super spies FDR (Played by Chris Pine) and Tuck (Played by Tom Hardy), a pair of best chums who globe trot around in slick suits, hit on gorgeous gals, and track a terrorist by the name of Heinrich (Played by Til Schweiger). After their target narrowly gets away in the opening shoot out, a confrontation that leaves Heinrich’s brother Jonas dead, FDR and Tuck return to the states and are benched out of protection from Heinrich. These perfect male specimens also apparently have crappy luck when it comes to women. FDR enjoys womanizing and Tuck, a divorced dad, resorts to online dating to meet a good gal. As it turns out, down-on-her-luck Lauren (Played by Reese Witherspoon), a product-testing executive, is paired up with Tuck. After their first date, which goes rather well, Lauren bumps into FDR, who pursues her until she agrees to go on a date with him. FDR and Tuck soon decide to reveal to each other who they have been dating. When they realize it is the same girl, they decide they are still going to pursue Lauren and let her decide who she wants to be with. This does not stop them from trying to sabotage each other in the process, using every spy trick in the book.

This Means War leans heavily on the gag that these two guys use every espionage tool at their disposal to keep tabs on each other’s progress with Laruen, who remains clueless the entire time. They conceal hidden cameras in her apartment, tap her phone, and have a team of techies that aid them along and deliver information. It’s all slightly amusing but never overly hilarious until Tuck takes Laruen paintballing, after she tells her best friend Trish (Played by Chelsea Handler, who plays herself here) that he is a bit too safe and earnest. What transpires is a hysterical shoot out at a paintball range, a scene that single handedly out shines every other humorous moment This Means War has to offer. This trumping each other does get fatigued at times, the film always trying to devise another scenario where one can shoot the other with a knock out dart or one can use a mini spy plane to tail the other.

When the one note gag yawns, the film suddenly remembers the side plot involving Heinrich, who is slowly making plans of his own to find FDR and Tuck. The problem here is that the film brushes over these moments and seems too anxious to get back to Tuck and FDR’s battle for Lauren. If the filmmakers were going to half-ass this aspect of the film, you would have thought that they would have made their scuffle over Lauren the only plot. What makes this even worse is that there are so many plot holes in the Heinrich plot that nothing ever adds up! Half the time we are just left hanging. We learn that he is a terrorist but who does her terrorize exactly? What is the device at the beginning of the film and why is it so sinister? Why does he even need to be arrested? Because he is frequents swanky rooftop bars? Who cares, back to Tuck hijacking a radio frequency and feeding FDR false information while he is on a date!

For such a lackluster film, at least Pine, Hardy, and Witherspoon all come out with their dignity in tact. In addition to their physical appearance, these three actually posses talent and know how to make everything work, even if they are straining. It’s good to have Witherspoon back after a string of low-key dramas no one remembers. She was lovable while she juggles two love interests. If you’ve seen Inception, Bronson, or Warrior, then you already know that Hardy is an astonishingly talented guy (Seriously, see Bronson for a mind blowing performance) and here, he plays things fairly average, something that was both fresh after some of the roles he has taken and somewhat disappointing because he is a truly colorful guy. Like Witherspoon, Pine hasn’t had much of a presence at the movies since his awesome performance as Captain Kirk in Star Trek. He retains some of the cockiness he utilized when he tackled Captain Kirk, acting as the much more confident one to Hardy’s average Joe.

This Means War is loaded with photogenic moments. A glimmering explosion here, a sexy thespian there, and strobe like fight scenes everywhere. It’s painfully obvious at times (Lauren is a product tester who is also testing two guys to figure out who is the better choice) and the message is about as subtle as an elephant crashing through your front door. Yes, love is a battlefield where people get hurt and it can also be a game where you have to plot your next move meticulously. But in This Means War, the plotting of the moves is sometimes borderline creepy (Seriously, phone tapping?!). It’s all in good fun says director McG, who plays everything up to juvenile boys just being juvenile boys. I enjoyed myself in spurts during This Means War, never really hating it but never really having my funny bone tickled too hard (The paintball scene was an exception). I guess I should look on the bright side, at least Katherine Heigl was nowhere to be found.

Grade: C+ 

Anti-Film School’s Academy Awards Coverage: The Best Picture Race

by Charles Beall

Throughout the next month, I will be contributing articles about the Oscar race this year.  To start things off, let’s talk about the big race, Best Picture.

9 Best Picture nominees

When the Academy announced that there would be a new voting system to select a Best Picture nominee (a film has to have 5% of first place votes to gain a nomination), I aired on the side of skepticism.  At first, when the Academy announced that there would be 10 nominees two years ago, I cried foul.  This is the Academy Awards!  Why would we sully it by letting in five other films?  However, take a look at these ten films (the first five released in 2009 and the last five in 2010, respectively): District 9, The Blind Side, An Education, A Serious Man, Up, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, 127 Hours, Toy Story 3, and Winter’s Bone.  Aside from The Blind Side (total turd), these ten films are exceptional “unconventional” films that never would’ve been nominated if there were only five nominees.  Sure they can’t win, but they definitely were deserving of a nomination for Best Picture.  I decided that I liked this 10 Best Picture nominee system.

However, per the new Academy rules, there could be anywhere between five and ten nominees for the films of 2011.  The movies that were to be nominated had to, as I stated, receive 5% of number one votes.  So, with this complicated system, I assumed there would be between five and seven nominees.  Yet, there were nine.

Here are the tiers these films fall into:

(Note: films with an * are films I have not seen yet.  I can only give the impression I get from them, whereas the films I have seen, I can attempt to attest to why they were nominated.)

The Five– these would’ve been the five nominated films if there were only five nominees:

The Artist*
This is a film that has Oscar written all over it.  A nostalgic look at Hollywood, a silent film in black and white, and a feel-good, original idea, this movie is the kind of warm hug Academy members like.

The Descendants
The Descendants is the tailor-made, quirky Fox Searchlight Oscar bait we’ve all come to expect, yet don’t let that detract from how great of a film it is.  Alexander Payne is a wonderful filmmaker and this film, his first since the incredible Sideways, goes along with his theme of middle aged men “coming of age.”  Anchored by a wonderful performance by George Clooney (I think he deserves the Oscar), The Descendants is worthy of the respect heaped upon it, and even though it oozes of “Oscar prestige,” it truly is a great American film

The Help
The Help is the type of crowd-pleasing hit that the Academy loves to recognize to show that it isn’t a bunch of out-of-touch, pretentious white people.  I enjoyed The Help, yet I have some reservations about it.  First, it is entertaining without being overly confident in itself; it doesn’t wear its message on its sleeve.  We know that segregation in the South is a disgusting stain on our nation’s history, yet The Help doesn’t delve into how blatantly horrible it was to make the actions of the white people in the movie seem more noble than that of the Help.  With that said, it almost does go off the deep end.  Yes, it portrays the bravery of certain white women and certain African American women, but it comes off that without the white women, the Help would’ve never had their story told.  The film teeters on that cliff, but the filmmakers realize that that is too easy of a plot device, so I commend them for not taking the easy route.

While I would’ve liked a more “intense” portrayal of racism in the South, The Help suffices for reaching such a wide audience.  The film is honest and takes its time to develop its great characters.  In a year with only five nominees, I wouldn’t have selected The Help; however, when there are ten spots, I think it is deserving as one of the ten nominees.

Hugo
Hugo is a marvel and the best film I’ve seen this year.  This love letter to film, imagination, and life is completely engulfing.  As Scorsese’s first 3D film, he utilizes the technology to add, well, another dimension to the story.  There are no gimmicks and you are literally immersed into a world that could only come out of careful planning and love of source material.  I cannot praise this film enough, and in any year, this would be in the top five, if not number one spot.  Hugo deserves all of its 11 Academy Award nominations.

Midnight in Paris
The Academy loves Woody Allen, which is ironic because Woody never shows up to the ceremony.  However, if there is any comeback film for Allen after some flubs in years past, it is Midnight in Paris.  This is such a cute, original movie that offers an escape for not only the main character, but for the entire audience.  This is one of the best movies of the year and worthy of its four nominations.

The “honor-to-be-nominated” Crew– if there were five nominees, these wouldn’t have been nominated, but with the current voting system (and the former 10 nominee system), they are:

The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick’s fifth feature film is a simply beautiful, undeniably maddening meditation on life.  If there were only five nominees for Best Picture, this wouldn’t have been nominated (even though, I believe, he would’ve been nominated for Best Director-the Academy would oftentimes nominate a director whose film wasn’t nominated for Best Picture) but with the new system, it got in there.  There is an almost cult-like following for this film and I was honestly surprised that it was nominated.  It is a unique film, and this definitely “diversifies” the Academy’s canon of nominated films.  It won’t take home the big prize, but it definitely has been honored with its 3 nominations.

Moneyball*
A movie about math and baseball, written by Aaron Sorkin, and starring Brad Pitt.  I haven’t seen it, but heard it is great.  This is the Academy trying to be cool, I suppose.

War Horse*
Steven Spielberg.  World War I.  Epic.  Is the Academy still sorry for snubbing Saving Private Ryan?

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close*
This smells Weinsteinesque (more on that later).

Harry Potter WAS NOT snubbed

Fans are crying foul on the “snub” of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 in the Best Picture race.  Folks, there was no snub.  This film did not deserve a nomination for Best Picture; it was the worst film in the franchise.  Now, before you call me a death eater or a Slytherin, I urge you to do some soul searching and ask yourself if this really was the movie you thought it was.

Now, in defense of the Academy, they have opened their minds somewhat when it comes to films of different caliber.  The Lord of the Rings trilogy, for instance, was nominated for 30 Academy Awards, winning 17 (including a clean sweep for The Return of the King).  Yes, the Academy has been stingy on which films they nominate (fantasy/science fiction-wise), but The Lord of the Rings films were exceptional, bridging fanboy/girl devotion with a mass audience appeal.  That isn’t to say the Harry Potter franchise didn’t do such a thing; it did, but not to the extent of respecting the source material in such a way that the LOTR filmmakers did.

Now, as I stated earlier, ask yourself if the final film really was that incredible.  Take a look at both the entire final book and the penultimate film in the series.  Both of these took their time developing both the story and the characters; the final film did not.  There was a checklist of obligatory plot points to be filmed and they were done in such a rapid succession that one did not have time to emotionally process what was happening to the characters we have grown to love.  The final LOTR film was 200 minutes.  The final Harry Potter film was barely over two hours.  With so much story left in the second half of the book, the filmmakers didn’t develop it into drama; they shot it and sent it off to 3D rendering.

Is the Harry Potter film series terrible?  Absolutely not.  I believe that for such a massive, original world that J.K. Rowling created, the filmmakers did a reasonably excellent job in adapting it for the big screen.  However, after seven well-made films, the eighth just floundered, portraying itself as something that it was not and seducing loyal fans into thinking it was the best in the series.

Don’t hate on the Academy for this “snub.”  There have been sequels that were nominated for Best Picture (and some that won) that were far more deserving than Part 2.  True, The Return of the King won Best Picture for two reasons: it was a great film, but also the conclusion to a flawless motion picture trilogy.  That is what gets rewarded by the Academy, not an “easy” sequel to an otherwise great film series.

“But The Blind Side was nominated for Best Picture,” one might say.  I know…I never said the Academy was perfect.  However, there is a huge difference in an unworthy film getting nominated for Best Picture and an unworthy film not getting nominated for Best Picture.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 falls into the latter category.

In conclusion, it must be said that the Harry Potter film series, as a whole, stands as a landmark in motion picture history, and for that, both as a lover of the series and as a cinephile, I sing its praise.

What should’ve been the “ninth” and tenth films?

I put “ninth” in quotes because, while the 8 films that were expected or had a reasonable chance of being nominated for Best Picture were, the ninth film, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was a shocker.  There is a hardcore group of fans of this film, and while I have not yet seen it, I can tell you that it is one of the worst reviewed films of the past ten years (according to Rotten Tomatoes) to be nominated for Best Picture.  So what happened?

As I stated earlier, the way the Academy has changed their voting rules over the last three award cycles allows films like Loud (and The Blind Side) to sneak in and nab a spot.  What happened with Loud is that there were 5% of people who loved this movie so much that they put it as the number one spot on their ballot among the list of 300 plus eligible films from 2011.  There is a great article from Entertainment Weekly that explains this whole system, and the link to that is right here:  http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/01/24/oscars-best-picture-why-nine-nominees/

So, now that you have your head wrapped around that, let us look at which films were “bumped off.”  I believe that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Bridesmaids were bumped off by Loud.  Some may argue that The Tree of Life also was a surprise, but with its devoted fanbase, I think it was always a shoo-in for a nod.  As explained in that Entertainment Weekly Article, Tattoo and Bridesmaids were probably voters third or fourth pick for their favorites of the year, which would’ve helped in other years, but not this one.  So, Academy members, if you find yourself passionate about a particular movie next year, make sure it gets your number one spot.  If The Dark Knight Rises is as incredible as its predecessor, you know what to do.

So, that concludes my analysis of the Best Picture race for 2011.  There will be more to come before and after the Academy Awards, so keep checking Anti-Film School for more updates.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)

by Steve Habrat

When is the last time you saw an honest to goodness awesome action film that got your heart pounding and your palms sweating? Can’t truly recall one that actually did its job? For me, it was Inception, but director Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is the most recent to really get me chewing my nails down. Truth be told, most action films rely too heavily on CGI deception, layering giant battling robots duking it out in a familiar American metropolis, rubbery superheroes darting around skylines saving tumbling airplanes, cramming as much busy aerial action into a wide shot as humanly possible, or something to that overblown extent. Sure it’s thrilling to look at and we admire how pretty the picture looks, how real the effects are getting, etcetera, but we never actually sweat bullets over the conflict because we know our CGI superhero will save the day no matter what. They are larger than life, so our answer is eradicating the life and you have an unstoppable man made creation. Don’t get me wrong, I adore superhero films and I love to see what the computer wizards in Hollywood will digitally dream up next, but they are never as invigorating as Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Most action films, sadly, are not.

Here’s the mission, if you choose to except: Acrobatic IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Played, for a fourth time, by Tom Cruise) and his brainy band of sidekick agents find themselves being blamed for an explosion at the Kremlin. In the explosion, a terrorist named Hendricks (Played by Michael Nyqvist) makes off with launch codes for nuclear missiles. The slippery Hendricks is hellbent on igniting nuclear war throughout the world. Russia blames the United States for the explosion and in response, the president issues “Ghost Protocol”, wiping out the IMF and leaving Hunt and his team to take the heat. Hunt turns to the newly appointed field agent Benji (Played by a superbly hilarious Simion Pegg), the curvy and vengeance seeking Jane (Played by Paula Patton), and the mysterious Brandt (Played by Jeremy Renner) to help him track down Hendricks, prevent a nuclear holocaust, and clear their names. Hunt also finds himself the target of a persistent Russian security force agent named Sidirov (Played by Vladimir Mashkov). To reject taking on this mission would be an absolute mistake.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol does have its fair share of eye candy effects moments. A massive sandstorm bears down on Hunt as he scales the massive Burj Khalifa in Dubi with nothing but high tech gloves that produce an adhesive, allowing him to stick to the side of the building. Wait until one of the gloves begins shorting out. That’s only the start of what is sure to be a classic sequence. Cars go somersaulting at Ethan, a massive explosion levels part of the Kremlin, and more. What turns up the adrenaline in this film is the fact that Cruise, who is one of the biggest and most recognizable stars on the planet, puts himself right in the center of the action. He takes more than a few tumbles in this film and at times, Bird’s camera seems to catch accurate spot-on reactions. At one point, I even turned to my friend that accompanied me and said, “Man, did you see his face? THAT looked pretty real and THAT was a look of pain on his face!” Cruise is the heart and soul of this franchise and, more importantly, keeping this film from veering off onto throwaway blockbuster territory. And yes, the film projects an epic scope but the action is tight and controlled, never appearing showy.

Credit should certainly go to director Brad Bird, who makes his first live action feature film. We knew he could make some heartwarming family friendly films (He is the man responsible for The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille), but the man works well with flesh and blood actors too. His cast has impeccable chemistry, gracefully playing off each other, delivering a whole slew of memorable one-liners, and actually working hand-in-hand in every situation they find themselves in. His camera floats along with Cruise as he inches along the Burj Khalifa, tossing his camera down the side of the building, giving us a sense of how high up Cruise actually is. He stages an intimate confession up close and personal and he lands jokes deviously, sometimes taking a second to for the laugh to squeak out of the viewers mouth. Wait until you see Benji and Hunt creeping around the Kremlin. There is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke that is adroitly landed. Bird holds tense moments extra long, making we the viewers feel the pressure that Hunt and his team are under. Bird certainly has a future in action.

Everything in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is top notch. Everything from the action, the chases, the acting, the CGI, the editing, the staging, the pacing, the feel, and the final showdown just connect and work together until the very last frame. The MVP here is without question Cruise, showing vast dedication to the project and risking life and limb for his art. The film packs the fireworks we all want from the Mission Impossible franchise but they never feel like they are there is a diversion from meager storytelling. The threat is truly there is this one is down to the wire. It’s a shame it wasn’t released during the summer movie season because it would have clobbered the competition, body slamming duds like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Green Lantern, and Cowboys and Aliens. Once you’ve had action this real and fun, you’ll never want to go back to the kind simulated on a computer.

Grade: A-

Sucker Punch (2011)

by Steve Habrat

After all the gun smoke had cleared and the credits crawled across the screen, it became crystal clear to me how Christopher Nolan settled on Zack Snyder for the reboot of Superman: Snyder simply showed him Sucker Punch. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that Nolan gushed over it either. Sucker Punch is a trippy puzzler that sends you stumbling from the theater to debate what the hell just happened with your friends, which is quite similar to what Nolan did with his towering Inception. But where Inception pulled off it’s elusiveness with refined sophistication, Sucker Punch takes the dirty, dusty road where dragons swoop from above, girls in fishnets wield 50 calibers, WWI zombie German soldiers leap from trenches, and our heroes bop around in a WWII bomber. And that is just naming a few of the oddities that Snyder lobbed into his obvious pet project. I’m sure by this point you’ve seen the other reviews of Sucker Punch and, to use a term from Mr. Obama, the film has taken quite a “shellacking.” Sure it’s big, loud, and completely overblown, but I oddly found myself enjoying the madness. What actually appalls me is that Battle: Los Angeles, a film that makes no attempt to be about anything except blowing everything up, actually received better reviews than this film did! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?! Did we see the same movie?

Maybe I was rooting for Snyder to actually pull off the impossible. Everyone under the sun has seen the unruly trailer. Snyder seemed like he wanted to shove every possible genre of film into one film to make one hulking masterpiece. One that encompasses everything from the kung-fu films to epic medieval fantasies. I truly found Sucker Punch to be a noble, and at times, refreshing attempt at it even if it was beginning to show signs of collapsing on itself. The film also has had a slight hypnotic affect over me in the sense that I am confident that there is more to this particular film than first meets the eye. The first time seems to be a shock and awe campaign to pin you to your seat but the more my mind wanders back and evaluates the little touches, the more I’m lured into wanting to uncover more about it.

I won’t dive to deeply into the plot of the film because some of it is up to you to piece together, but the film follows the starry-eyed, pig-tailed Babydoll (played by Emily Browning), who is admitted into a mental institution by her unhinged stepfather after she accidentally shoots her baby sister. It’s here that she falls under the care of the at times menacing and at times motherly but always vampy Dr. Gorski (played by Carla Gugino). Behind the walls of the institition, she embraces her new life in a brothel and learns to dance for the seedy men that come to drool over the young girls. Babydoll soon joins forces with the tough-as-nails leader Sweet Pea (played by Abbie Cornish), Sweet Pea’s gung-ho little sister Rocket (played by Jenna Malone), the uneasy “pilot” Amber (played by Jamie Chung), and the big guns specialist Blondie (played by Vanessa Hudgens). The gang rapidly starts plotting an escape from the institution/brothel and through their wildly untamed imaginations, envision elaborate dream-missions to find the supplies they need to break out of the big house.

While the film marvelously finds a perfect balance between the hectic dream worlds and the rotting walls of the institution, the film tries to cram so much in that points are a little to overpowering. There is an incredibly inspired sequence that takes place on a WWI battle field complete with zombified German soldiers wearing ghastly gasmasks, biplanes falling in flaming ruin from the sky, earth shaking explosions and a lofty android walker with a rabbit face that Amber maneuvers into a outrageously bad ass death machine. It’s a truly breathtaking action sequence that is worth the trip to see the movie alone. Sadly, the film stumbles when it ventures into the realm of medieval fantasy in a war sequence that smashes WWII together with the Lord of the Rings. I give it credit for being atypical but it’s shockingly monotonous and lacking in any sort of looming danger. This leads me to my next compliant, which is the fact that all the girls are magically scrappy superheroes. There is never any concrete justification and we are supposed to just embrace it. One sequence that is especially irritating is when Babydoll confronts three giant samurais. She flips through the air so repeatedly that I almost wanted to shout “ENOUGH ALREADY! WE GET IT!”

Ultimately, Sucker Punch overcomes the obstacles and still manages to be engaging. I still found myself consumed by much of it and the writing, although uneven, is never less than interesting. The dialogue is good but not great and the premise alone never lost me. The performances’ by the young actresses are finely tuned and convincing. I was extremely worried that they would be wooden. The standout is without question the wounded Rocket. She kicks ass while nursing the burden of a broken heart. I actually breathed a huge sigh of relief that the film never descended into a perverse fantasy for Snyder. While the girls are adorned in fishnets and lingerie, the film is surprisingly tame. We never get a glimpse of the burlesque dance sequences and instead are substituted with the dream world. An even bigger relief is that the film counters Snyder’s fixation with masculine heroes. I enjoyed the girl power feel that he explores this time around. It’s more substantial than his homoerotic bloodbath 300. It still comes in third to his colorful Dawn of the Dead remake and spacey adaptation of graphic novel juggernaut Watchmen. On top of it, Snyder further refines his coarse camerawork and his fluid montages of slow motion into real time. It all flows so gorgeously and it’s impossible not to eat it all up.

The aspect that truly wounds Sucker Punch is the ending where, like Watchmen, it crams all of it’s “profound” ideas in a brushed over climax that feels curiously unsatisfying. This is where the film truly flat lines. It piles on nonsensically cryptic monologues on top of some obvious visual symbolism. The film is convinced that it is a fine wine that will be savored as the taste sticks in your mouth. Unfortunately, it’s just a high-end, calorie-loaded beer that is surprisingly tasty in the beginning. A taste that you and your buddies exclaim about for the first few sips but when you reach the bottom of the bottle, you just gulp down the last drops to finish it. It wasn’t as refreshing as the first few half but it wasn’t impossible to polish off. You’ll oddly find yourself wanting to experience it all again to peel back some more layers and it will make for some good conversation in the long run.

Grade: B-

Sucker Punch is now available on Blu-ray and DVD.

In Time (2011)

by Steve Habrat

Imagine if Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan got together and decided they were going to make a futuristic version of Robin Hood set against a Clockwork Orange-esque wasteland. The new techno thriller In Time, directed by Andrew Niccol, has a lot on its mind and plenty to say. Unfortunately, it’s reduced to rambling, off on a tangent and showing no signs of stopping. To be fair, In Time has an interesting premise; a few original bursts here and there that save it from being disposable filler at the local theater. The film exhaustively tells us that time is precious, blah, blah, blah. Well my time is precious too and this film was given way too much time to peer down at me from it’s soap box and preach. That is what In Time was built for—to preach. Lucky enough, the film had the good fortune to be made and released during the Occupy Wall Street protests, which is another element that works in it’s favor. For as ambitious as this film is, it never obtains the epic, morose scope that Nolan produces or the multilayered psychology Kubrick gave us.

In Time shows us a world where humans stop aging at twenty-five. Once they hit the said age, a digital clock on their forearm begins ticking and humans have to earn more time to survive. Rather than money, your job pays you in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, etc. Time is also used as the currency, where the more time you have, the longer you live. The world is also divided up into time zones, where a sinister police force called the “Timkeepers” can monitor how much time is in the specific zone. These time zones also separate the wealthy from the poor.  Will Salas (Played by Justin Timberlake) comes from the slum Dayton, where one evening while visiting a seedy bar, stumbles across a wealthy man Henry Hamilton (Played by Matt Bomer) with a hundred years on his clock buying drinks for the crowd. A group of local gangsters called “Minutemen” set their eyes on him and threaten his life. Will narrowly saves Henry and hides him in a local warehouse where Henry explains to Will that he is one hundred and five years old and no longer feels the desire to live. While Will sleeps, Henry transfers all of his time to Will, making Will wealthy over night. Henry commits suicide and Will is captured on surveillance for suspicious behavior in the wake of the suicide. That evening, Will’s mother Rachel (Played by Olivia Wilde) does not have enough time on her for a bus ride and is forced to walk home. While desperately trying to reach Will for more time, her clock runs out and she dies in front of Will. Will sets out to drain the wealthy of as much time as he can, along the way meeting wealthy timelender Phillipe Weis and his beautiful daughter Sylvia (Played by Amanda Seyfried). Will is also being pursued by a relentless timekeeper named Raymond Leon (Played by Cillian Murphy).

Not an easy film to sum up, In Time does have a webbed storyline, but that’s not its problem. The film is often condescending, always assuming the viewer lacks the intelligence to follow what is going on. It’s under the impression that we can’t put together its unconcealed political message. It then drives its point home with such force, you almost want to shout “ENOUGH!” The film empties its narrative quickly, leaving the well dry for the last forty minutes of the movie. It’s just run, check in to hotel, steal more time, chase, repeat. There are characters that are not fleshed out enough, cramming them in at the beginning and then tossing them out the second Will meets Phillipe and Sylvia. I’m all for an intelligent thriller/blockbuster, but In Time thinks it’s a bit too smart. It also seems to demand that we take it seriously, but it’s difficult when the film is burdened with hammy acting.

After the film ended, one of my friends that accompanied me to our showing said he doesn’t think Justin Timberlake is capable of carrying an entire movie. He’s not a seasoned pro yet. I couldn’t agree more with this statement. He’s still an amateur in the acting game and trying to carry a film like this couldn’t have been the easiest task for him. When his mother bites the dust, Timberlake drops to his knees, wailing, and looks slightly like he is smack in the middle of a violent bowel movement. I didn’t buy his anguish and it’s unintentionally funny. This is not to say he doesn’t wield any talent, but he needs to stick to supporting roles until he really sharpens his acting a bit. He sometimes slips into overdramatics, attempting to embody the ominous hero but coming up short. He has yet to shake his pretty boy image.

The rest of the cast of In Time does an ample job with what they have to work with. Wilde does a reputable job for the little she is given as Will’s mother. I sometimes think she is capable of more than she produces, sometimes being reduced to just a pretty face and nothing more. You can’t help but bat an eye at some of the films she chooses to star in. Seyfried does fine work, working with something far more substantial than Twilight wannabe turds like Red Riding Hood. The vet here in all the sci-fi techno babble is Cillian Murphy as Raymond Leon. Murphy is a truly gifted actor that is always just below the radar. I wish he would get another major leading man role, as he always knocks it out of the park when he is in front of the camera (Seriously, just look at 28 Days Later, Red Eye, Batman Begins, and Inception!). Murphy does a good majority of the heavy lifting, even if he does look like he raided the wardrobe of The Matrix.

At the end of the day, In Time is an average thought provoking attack on capitalism and class rank. It also slips in some existential hooey but it’s fairly elementary and you will be just waving it off. Reluctant to embrace what it truly is, which is simply a futuristic Robin Hood thriller with some minor ideas and dressed in all black, it’s a decent little ride. You won’t be taking any of it home with you, replaying any major action sequences in your head, or raving about any performance outside of Murphy’s. You will be left wondering how Timberlake’s Salas magically morphs from desperate kid in the ghetto to ass-kicking superhero. Don’t concern yourself with it too much, you’ll never be told. In Time is uneven and bumpy, making me wish that I didn’t invest forty minutes of my time in the final act. If you’re in the market for a film in which all the actors and actresses look pretty, look no further than In Time.

Grade C+