In Time

It is the year 2026 and the global currency is not longer dollars or euros or pounds or dinars or rupees. It is time. In seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years. So if you want to travel by bus for a journey that takes 2 hours to walk, then you need to pay 2 hours as the fare for your ticket. Interesting right? You are born with a time frame of 25 years in your bank. Beyond 25 you don’t age a day. But you start eating away into the 1 hour that is provided for you in your account. For anything more, you need to work. And work really hard. Needless to say, you are paid in time. All of this is recorded in a chip that is built into your left arm which starts counting down from the instance that you complete 25 years of age. It is as if a bolt of energy passes through you and your clock suddenly starts counting down from 1 year.


In all of this, there are the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys are of course poor and stay in Zone 12 and have to work their way upwards to the Greenwich Zone or something like that. Those are the rich guys and ergo the bad guys. Sounds familiar right? Same old story really. Just that the currency has been changed to time and the standard policeman has been replaced by a time keeper. No points for really guessing the story and how it will finish in about 15 minutes into the movie. So I am not really going to waste my time or your time in describing the rest of the story.

Directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca / Lord of War), In Time is probably a serious waste of precious time – as ironic as it may seem. It lacks anything innovative despite a track record that Niccol has of giving us reasonably interesting movies. He does give us some interesting chase sequences but nothing which is brilliant and makes you want to sit upright in your seat. Just the same old boring stuff.

He doesn’t have much of support from the cast either. Never been a Justin Timberlake fan. Guess he is a director’s actor only. Been a fan of Amanda Seyfried but she surprisingly fails miserably in this one. I wonder if this years Razzies had these 2 performances which are outstandingly bad very honestly. The support cast including the otherwise decent Cillian Murphy is significantly below par.

Overall quite a disaster of a movie which would explain why it didn’t do too well across the board. I for one managed to sit through it. But couldn’t find anything great. Therefore 4 on 10. One doesn’t need to push for an opportunity to watch it – seriously.

Watch the trailer at http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi775265305/

Hancock

If ever there was an award ceremony for the world’s worst super hero movie then Hancock would be there somewhere in the top 5. For the life of me, I have not a clue as to why Hancock was never nominated for the Razzies in the year of release. In fact it was defended quite strongly by the razzies that the movie was actually not all that bad. I beg to differ with the Razzies on this count and retain my point of view. There is hardly a point of view that Peter Berg even attempts to make through the movie. I definitely give credit to Peter Berg for his versatility of acting and directing which very few people can claim to do. But just putting your name in the director’s slot does not a director make right? One has to pay careful attention to aspects that go beyond stating, “Lights, Camera, Action”. There are several elements of movie making that you would be best placed to identify and us amateur film critics would not be so sure about. But I would guess that the list would include, acting, editing, screenplay, dialogues, cinematography, script amongst the more important aspects and would then go on to the lesser ones. Dear Mr. Berg – with all due respect, I would guess you have missed out on almost every single aspect of film making and focused on just putting together 90 minutes of crap based on some really big names in the business of acting.

Well you weren’t all that ill placed Mr. Berg. Quite certainly there would have been enough and more in the world who loved the concept of a normal looking human being who is a super hero. So what if he is drunk out of its wits more often that not? And so what if he causes more damage to general property that most of the bad guys would have anyways caused? It is all supposed to be for the greater good right? Wrong as the people of the city say over a period of time. It is not possible to sustain this random destruction of property in the name of saving human lives and stopping crime. And therefore, Hancock (Will Smith) very quickly finds himself in jail doing some time. But not before he is backed up by a Public Relations expert called Ray (Jason Bateman) whose life is saved by Hancock (what is the probability of being stuck in front of a train at a manned level crossing and the train doesn’t stop but continues to run into you. Obviously there is no one who has flagged the train to a stop earlier). Together Ray and Hancock try to repair Hancock’s ruined image in the market.

The only saving grace about Hancock seems to be the ethereal presence of Charlize Theron. Sadly, it has nothing much to do with her acting prowess and only to do with her looks. But I am not complaining. I could look at her for the rest of my life. So 90 minutes seemed more like 90 seconds. Consistency errors are the hall mark of Hancock and as mentioned earlier, there are no aspects that are basic to movie making which are actually followed in the movie. It may be random fun but it is not a good movie by any stretch of imagination. 3 on 10 is my verdict.

Watch the trailer at http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2497904921/