Time Out

I'd heard that it wasn't exactly "good," but I still felt compelled to check out the 1995 movie Nick of Time when it ran recently on HBO. The allure of Johnny Depp and Christopher Walken in one movie was too much for me to turn away.

Nick of Time is a short 90-minute thriller that unfolds in real time. Depp plays a widower whose young daughter is kidnapped by a villainous Walken. Walken will kill the girl if Depp doesn't assassinate the governor of California (who is making a re-election campaign appearance at a local hotel) within the next hour-and-a-half.

It's easy to see why the movie was so widely panned -- it's preposterous from top to bottom. And it all basically stems from how implausibly stupid the bad guys are. The audience is asked to accept that a conspiracy to assassinate the governor could involve literally dozens of people, and yet still somehow require a random stranger to pull the trigger. It asks you to accept that this random stranger would be drafted in a train station just 90 minutes before the deed was to be carried out. And it just gets worse from there.

In this age before widespread cell phone use, the villain pulls the hero's strings by constantly showing up to interact with him in person. So now you're asked that the conspiracy realized it needed a patsy, but isn't concerned about being seen on security cameras with the guy. Then the villain gives the hero a surprisingly wide berth to screw around while working up to the kill; he interacts with several other characters, appears to hide in a mens' room for 10 minutes... all without triggering serious reprisal from the villains.

If one thing in this movie is more implausible than the plot, though, it's the dialogue. Each scene is crammed to bursting with the sort of amateur lines whose creation you can imagine were preceded by "and then it'd be so cool if he said this!" Worse than simply being unnatural, it's oftentimes outright comical.

And yet, I can't quite bring myself to hate the movie. It all comes down to a couple of things. First are the performances of the actors that drew me in in the first place. Johnny Depp and Christopher Walken act their asses off. Depp tries as hard as he can to muscle over the silly plot and sillier dialogue to bring a measure of truth to the proceedings. And Walken, in his patented way, plays a heightened sort of madman that almost reads like someone doing a Christopher Walken impersonation -- it's brilliant in its own way. The movie is stupid throughout, but these two somehow manage to also make it entertaining.

Secondly, there is the likelihood that this film went on to inspire the creation of the TV series 24. Sure, Jack Bauer is a skilled agent and not a random civilian, but otherwise the first season opened up exactly as this movie -- a real time thriller in which a man's daughter is abducted to coerce him into carrying out a political assassination. 24 not only did this story better, but was one of the best things on TV for several years (before devolving into a parody of itself). So if Nick of Time had anything to do with providing the inspiration, I feel compelled to give it a bit of a pass here.

Still, the movie is not good by any objective measure. So I'm going to give it a C- grade. It's really not worth your time, unless the idea of a hot mess starring Depp and Walken appeals to you on the face of it as it did to me.