In many ways, In Time is perfectly timed: It’s a science fiction movie about a future in which time is literally money, and 99 percent of the population is working for the next day of their lives. Dead bodies of people who spent more time than they earned litter the sidewalks as everyone else rushes from work to home and back again, without a second to spare. The poor rage against the wealthy for having millions of years—being effectively immortal—while the poor are living from minute to minute. The simple shift of money to time, and the resultant raising of stakes from going underwater on a mortgage to losing your life, makes a Robin Hood scenario a moral imperative.

Too bad the Robin Hood is Justin Timberlake. Though he gamely takes his shirt off in the opening scene for ogling purposes—everyone stops physically aging at age 25, so the movie for once has a clever reason to cast good-looking hotties in every single role—Timberlake is utterly unbelievable as a dirt-poor factory worker “from the ghetto.” Every line falls flat, in part because he’s taking the role so seriously; he’s a gifted comic actor, but this is apparently his desperate reach for legitimacy. It’s an ill-timed leap for seriousness: The stupid time puns that dot the script (“I don’t have time for a girlfriend!”) call for some early-Schwarzenegger-style self-conscious action-movie humor, not a Wahlberg wannabe.

The only time Timberlake’s delivery limbers up is when he falls for a poor little time-rich girl (a wooden Amanda Seyfried, who should win a special Oscar for Most Running While Wearing Impractical Heels), who becomes Bonnie to his Clyde. In the couple of scenes where they’re expected to act flirty with each other, they remind us what the movie could have been—a funny, self-aware kick in the pants. But the acting’s not all bad news: Cillian Murphy does fine, understated for-the-paycheck work as a grizzled 75-year-old detective hot on the couple’s trail.

This is not entirely a terrible movie. Fun little design touches shine through in every scene. Citizens have glowing green clocks embedded in their wrists, adding a nice eerie glow to a (relatively chaste) skinny-dipping scene, for example, and though all the cars look like big boats from the ’70s, they putter along with gentle electric-car sound effects, and their huge doors hiss open and closed on pneumatics. The premise has a nice pulp-magazine flavor, and the rules of the sci-fi elements are consistent. That’s a lot more than most genre movies can muster nowadays. But like The Adjustment Bureau—another sci-fi movie featuring an attractive couple running around a whole lot—In Time feels like it brushes against greatness, only to fall apart before it can realize the potential locked inside itself. recommended