An Amanda Seyfried Double Feature

I really, really wanted to like this movie.  Justin Timberlake is turning into a fine actor, while I really am beginning to dig Amanda Seyfried, and this movie's premise seemed pretty cool.

In the not so distant future, there is no money used for the procuring goods--its time.  Notably, minutes and seconds, sometimes hours and days.  A car will cost you a few months.  When you are born, you are given unlimited time until age 25, then you are given one year.  If you are of great wealth, you have lots and lots of time.  If you are poor, then you have little.  Once your time runs out, you have nothing.  And then you die.  And the time is kept in some sort of digital countdown clock embedded on your arm.

JT plays Will, who, like many people in his poor side neighborhood, lives day to day, sometimes getting only enough hours to last until the next day.  He runs into a dude who has nothing left to live for, and manages to give JT a few hundred years to work with before he offs himself.  The police think that JT murdered the guy, and the chase is on.

Will ends up in the rich district, where he meets up with Amanda Seyfried's Sylvia, and up until now, its an imaginative movie with great effects, great story and really solid premise.  And somewhere around the halfway point, it just turns into a getaway-chase film, where Will and Sylvia try to avoid the task squad set up to find them, led by Cillian Murphy's detective Raymond Leon.

The cast is good, and again, I do like Timberlake, and he gives a good performance as Will.  Seyfried's Amanda is just quirky enough to be really cute, and Murphy's Detective Leon makes a great adversary for our main characters.

Don't avoid Amanda Seyfried.  Just avoid this movie.  Or
both of them.

The movie just mires itself down in becoming something it shouldn't, going from a creative movie to a standard, predictable romantic action movie.  Too bad.

And speaking of Amanda Seyfried... "Red Riding Hood"?  Bad movie.  Just a crappy film all around.  The premise was good, a dark retelling of the legend of the Big Bad Wolf and Red Riding Hood, but unlike "In Time", it doesn't even start good.  I don't even want to tell you how this movie unfolds, mostly because its late and I don't want to rehash it.  Just avoid it.