#14: Tempo di uccidere/Time to Kill (1989)

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

This time: another bloody straight to video effort. Well, unless you happened to live in Italy. Because unusually for something in the canon of Cage, this is an Italian movie, albeit that it was shot in English, presumably with the same aim for international appeal that led to Cage being cast in the first place. Information about the production seems thin on the ground, although I have seen it suggested that this is because no-one involved has a good word to say about their time working on it.

The film is a historical war drama, following the adventures of Cage’s Lieutenant Silvestri during Italy’s military occupation of Ethiopia during the 1930s. My knowledge of this event is limited to some dim recollections of GSCE history lessons about the whole thing being a solid demonstration that the League of Nations (a sort of proto-UN formed between the World Wars) was a huge crock of shit, but this is all background detail here.

Instead, we follow Silvestri’s own strange little adventures as he first tries to get to the dentist, then struggles to get home to Italy to see his wife. The first portion is told in flashback as he relates his attempt to take a shortcut as he walks back to a base where he can get his dodgy tooth looked at.

Almost immediately we get a charmingly odd scene where for no explicable reason he decides to make a lizard smoke one of his cigarettes. I mean it is probably bad on some level to give what appears to be a real lizard a real cigarette but it is quite funny. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the last enjoyable thing in the film.

Later on his journey, he encounters a local woman and decides to rape her. Which is particularly unpleasant because the film seems to attempt to justify this by not having her mind that much after the fact. Luckily it alls gets sorted out by him accidentally shooting her, so he heads back to base wear he gets his teeth fixed and his return to Italy approved.

There do turn out to be consequences for Silvestri’s actions — his return to Italy is endangered when he believes that he has caught leprosy from his victim. But even when he finally confesses to her father (who’s just told him that she was not, after all, infected), there’s something uneasy about how detached the film is, as though it doesn’t really want to acknowledge the nastiness.

Cage does a reasonable job with what he’s given, especially towards the end as Silvestri’s fear, guilt and desperation appear to wear on his sanity, but it’s minor stuff. Without the sheer ludicrousness of something like Vampire’s Kiss there just isn’t anything that compelling about watching a basically unpleasant character like Silvestri.

To be charitable, Silvestri’s story should probably be read as an intentional metaphor for Italy’s terrible actions against Ethiopia in this era, as remorse for an appalling period in a nation’s history. But in the end it pulls its punches a little too much, leaving the viewer with not quite enough to really engage with — it presents some stuff happening, but fails to interrogate it, to show why that stuff happening might be worth thinking about.

Still, the bit where the lizard has a fag is good.

THE NUMBERS

3 — Silvestri fires 3 bullets in an attempt to kill a Hyena. He instead only manages to kill the Ethiopian woman.

6 — Silvestri’s colleague reckons that even if he confessed to shooting the woman, the worst punishment would be his leave being suspended for 6 months.

10 — A doctor explains to Silvestri that most likely symptoms of leprosy would only be displayed 10 to 20 years after infection. Warning: if you think you or someone you know might have leprosy, do not follow the advice given in this film. Bing informs me that it can take as little as 3 to 5 for symptoms to appear.

15 — The time in special army talk is 15 hundred and 30 hours when Silvestri’s superior stops their car to go for a wee. Silvestri uses this opportunity to fuck off with all his superior’s money so he can buy his way onto a ship home.

30 — When Silvestri attempts to sneak onboard a ship back to Italy the captain tells him he wants a bribe of 30,000 lira.

36 — The film is set in 1936. Other things that happened in 1936 include the opening of the first Butlin’s, the introduction of the speaking clock and the abdication of King Edward, none of which are mentioned in this film.

THE RESULT

Another single number. Come on, gods of the Nouveau Shamanic, a man’s got to eat!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Fire Birds, released in the UK as Wings of the Apache. It’s basically Top Gun with helicopters. According to someone on an internet forum about flight simulators:

“That movie is an embarassment to all Apache pilots. My dad was actually there when they filmed the movie, the real pilots hated it.”

So that’s sure to be good.