Contains Spoilers: Time to Kill is boring, stop watching Deadfall when Nic Cage dies

Tempo di Uccidere (Time to Kill) (1989)

Unfortunately, this movie isn't nearly as exciting as that picture on the IMDB page makes it look. It wasn't bad, and I think it's a good performance by Cage, but it was very slow-moving. Also, we had just finished Vampire's Kiss (which you all have to watch, immediately, remember?) and so it was kind of hard to transition from the crazy comic energy of that one to the quiet, depressing world of this one.

How depressing? Nicolas Cage is a soldier in the Italian army during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, who believes he has contracted leprosy from a girl he raped. Heavy. The rape scene is pretty graphic, and clearly there are no occasions for funny-face-Cage moments in this one.

But, we powered through, and I'm glad I've seen it I guess. The strange thing about this movie is that it is made by an Italian director and is about Italians, yet no Italian is spoken in the movie, only English. So I guess when they released it in Italy they had to dub it or subtitle it into Italian? I wonder why they chose to make it that way.

After we finished this one we decided we still had time for one more (what a wild Friday night!), and we had Firebirds, which is the next on the list. But it looked like another war movie, and I just couldn't handle it. So, we decided it would be ok to bend the rules a bit and go for Deadfall.

Deadfall (1993)

It's about grifting! I love movies about grifting! But this was just. so. awful. It's directed by Cage's brother, Christopher Coppola, so I'm assuming Nic did this movie as a favor.

And luckily he did, because now the world has this:

Eddie




This character was hilarious, so manic, so off-the-wall, so badly bewigged, that it was magic. A coked up gritted-teeth-talking Tony Clifton. We laughed out loud at probably every scene he was in.

Too bad the rest of the movie couldn't hold up its weight. In fact, the suckiness of this one inspired a new rule for our Cage-a-thon; if his character dies, and the movie is terrible, it's ok to turn it off. We're only in it for the Cage, after all.