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In the dystopian future presented in “In Time,” everyone stops aging at 25. Through a system that is never really explained, people are granted one more year to live, tracked by a glowing green clock on their forearm that counts down weeks, hours and minutes. The term “biological clock” is given a whole new meaning: If you run out of minutes, your body literally times out.

To further complicate things, time is money. A cup of coffee will cost you four minutes, while a trip to the city of the rich, New Greenwich, will take a couple years off your life. Will Salas (a scruffy Justin Timberlake) lives on a day at a time: The year he had was all but spent covering his mother’s debt.

In a local bar, Will stumbles across a rich man named Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer) who is flashing over a century, and helps him escape from a local gang. Tired of living, Henry transfers all his years to Will, leaving himself just enough time to fall off a bridge.

With his newfound time, Will travels to New Greenwich, where he discovers that the rich are sitting on thousands of years they aren’t using: “The poor die and the rich don’t live.” He kidnaps Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried), the daughter of a rich magnate, in hopes of collecting a large amount of time he can share with the less fortunate back in his home district.

At this point in time, the movie follows formula like clockwork: The rich girl sees how badly the poor are doing and decides to help the hero in his cause; the reformed Bonnie and Clyde try to stay one step ahead of an agent (Cillian Murphy) bent on maintaining the status quo; the hero steals from the rich and gives to the poor… should I continue?

None of this made the movie any less enjoyable, however. Although I’ve enjoyed his comedic performances on “Saturday Night Live,” it was nice to see Timberlake step into a different role. He was devilish and desperate enough to pull off a bank robber, and though I didn’t always buy his scenes that were supposed to be more dramatic, he proved he’s come a long way from the boy bands of yesteryear.

Ultimately, “In Time” comes with a message of class inequality, all the more poignant considering the recent Occupy Wall Street movement. The movie doesn’t hit you over the head with this theme, but I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about it as I walked out of the theatre.Like the very best movies, “In Time’ makes you think. 

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