I have to agree that this movie is just nowhere near as good as it aspires, or is claimed by some, to be. While I will give the production a fair bit of credit, as this is, for it's budget, a pretty competently shot film (serviceable, but nothing new or exciting), everything comes across as amateurish. There are more than a few shots where we just linger on a moment in which nothing of interest is happening. That's nothing major, but useless shots and random cuts can be a pet peeve of mine.
MILD SPOILER (We also get a nice glimpse of the world's most obvious surveillance camera with its giant blinking red light shining in our faces. Though we come to understand it wouldn't matter if those being spied on knew of the camera's existence, it really does speak poorly for the surveillance team. Granted, they are played as less than competent). END SPOILER
The acting I can forgive for the most part. It's a budget issue and you do the best with what you have. However, in a movie with a lot of "menacing" characters, a lack of acting chops can make the characters seem ridiculous. Freeman's Mr. Jay toes the line for the most part, but he has several moments where he comes across as reading lines that sound way too unnatural and, well, "written" if you catch my meaning. Leo fairs worse - his inability to sell his cliche and awful tough-guy dialogue does nothing to keep his boring scene moving. Becky is also quite awful, her eyes locked almost constantly in a frightening wide-eyed stare, but she gets a tiny bit better towards the end of her last scene and we see that some of her earlier, truly terrible line readings might have been some awful acting by the character and not the actress.
What really sinks this movie, however, is the writing. The pointless and rather dull story aside, the structural device of the film is vastly misused. I'll admit to being a sucker for this type of story device in film, but it can be butchered, like it was here. There are way too many sequences where we have to sit through the same conversations we've already heard in previous scenes. Sometimes this can work in movies when we don't quite understand the situation at hand and are getting new information from a different point-of-view (and this movie does pull this off the first time we hear a phone conversation from a different perspective) but in Ten 'til Noon we are subjected to the HIGHLY pointless Mr. Duke sequence in which we listen to two phone calls that we've already heard from both sides (Mr. Duke's voice is clearly heard whenever someone speaks to him on the phone) and then meet a truly pointless character in Ruben whose story might have led somewhere interesting but is never heard from again.
MILD SPOILER Ruben's existence really is inconsequential when his task of holding a bank hostage to keep the cops at bay seems almost unnecessary. Mr. Duke and his associate kill a total of three people in what seems to be a very public and well used parking lot near/at a motel, so stealth doesn't seem to be necessary for their plans. END SPOILER
This is the kind of structural gimmick that should only be put into effect when you know how to use it (For a big screen example of a movie that completely wastes its gimmick check out, or better yet don't check out, Vantage Point). For this film, every new sequence should shed new light on the opening scene and its characters while possibly fleshing out a few side characters, but all we get are subsequent segments of around ten minutes (another quibble with the film - the scenes do not all equal the same amount of time from what I could tell/time, but they're close) most of which spend at least half that time on things we already know.
Thus the true problem with this film, and it's a dealbreaker, is that it claims to be a movie in which we learn how much can happen in a ten minute span and yet almost nothing of interest happens for the entire length of the film. As the title of this thread claims - this is a true waste of time. That said, I've spent more than ten minutes detailing all of this, and that's more than this movie has earned.
I'd give it a 4 out of 10.
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