Hollywood has solved the prickly matter of having to hire pesky 40-somethings for 50-something roles. With a little Philip K Dickery and the conception of time as currency, they can simply cast Olivia Wilde as a 50-year-old grandmother. It’s easy when you know how.

In such a world, your morning latte would be priced not in pounds or dollars, but minutes. 99-cent stores become 99-second stores. Every man, woman and child is allotted 26 years at birth: 25 years in which they age, 1 in which they wait to die – a ticking clock digitised upon their arms for everyone to see. When you work, you reclaim a few hours in pay. Try your hand at the casino, and suddenly you’ve lost those and a few more besides. The daily rhythms of life aren’t so different to our own, except theirs would promote more than just a vague notion of a finite future. At 5 hours a night, a stay in a motel takes you demonstrably closer to death. That car you always dreamt of? 59 years before tax. When time is money, you do a lot of running.

The society of ‘In Time’ is divided into zones: the poor in one, the rich in another. Think of them as tax brackets for the time rich. Guarding the borders are Timekeepers. One bright sunny morning, a body is found floating in the river downtown. Raymond Leon has seen dozens of cases like this. A wealthy corpse looks like any other, except they have more reason than most to wind up as such. This particular soul once had a century of time, and now he has none. The only lead is a nearby surveillance camera, which captured a young man fleeing the scene.

Will Salas has always lived one day at a time. He was born into the ghettos of Dayton, where crime is rife among the poor and desperate. Out drinking one night, he meets a 105-year-old who looks barely a day over 25. When the city’s mob comes looking, Will ferries him to a desolate warehouse by the river. Holed up for the night, Will learns the truth. Far from being a precious commodity, time is plentiful enough to serve the needs of everybody. Yet when immortality itself is for sale, the rich choose instead to horde it for themselves. As Will sleeps, the stranger gifts him his remaining time, before heading out to a bridge to see the sunrise. Moments later, his body tumbles into its lifeless journey upstream.

Putting 2 and 2 together has never been the forte of big screen detectives, which is why Raymond gives chase, and Will has something to run from. That merry dance takes them to the wealthy district of New Greenwich, where geriatric opulence is the norm. Age has no meaning there. At an extravagant party, Will meets the young daughter of a wealthy businessman. She feels suffocated by her father; conscious that his endless pursuit of time has left the act of living a concern only of the working class.

They set off together, of course. You suspected they might. That they have bigger plans than love and daring adventure, maybe less so. In Time is an allegory for capitalism itself. Runaway inflation, the threat of imminent collapse; the treachery of socialism. Wrapping that message in the dystopian shell of Blade Runner helps the medicine go down, as does recruiting Amanda Seyfried with her rolling wardrobe of ever-shorter skirts. Justin Timberlake, meanwhile – so perfect in The Social Network – is finally undone by his limitations. When he cocks his gun to gruffly declare “I’m gonna make them pay“, it brings to mind a Mickey Mouse veteran playing hoodlum. It’s an appropriate enough comparison, since, by the time it ends, In Time has become a sort of modern-day Thelma and Louise. Not without charm, these glamorous bank robbers; bandits of time inequity.