Nick of Time (1995)

Nick of Time arrives from 1995, a real-time thriller in which Johnny Depp's accountant is given ninety minutes to shoot a governor or lose his daughter. The clock is the gimmick, the Bonaventure Hotel is the maze, and Christopher Walken is the man with the pistol and the patience of a cat. It grossed eight million against thirty-three, which is the sort of number that ends conversations.

On the matter of cultural consciousness, the film is a period piece in the most literal sense. Charles S. Dutton and Gloria Reuben occupy supporting roles with competence and no comment, and the screenplay never asks the audience to think about why they are there. This is 1990s ensemble casting, unremarkable then, unremarkable now. The governor is a woman, played by Marsha Mason, and a woman in a suit does the heavy lifting for the villains, but the film has no thesis about power and gender. She is a target. Targets do not have politics.

The closest thing to a message is the lobbyist, a man in a grey suit who wants revenge because the governor broke her promises to his business interests. Money in politics, then. A faint whiff of it, anyway, the sort of thing a thriller reaches for when it needs a villain with a motive. There is also a disabled veteran who feigns deafness and later beats a woman unconscious with his wooden leg, which the film treats as a joke and a triumph in roughly equal measure. No sermon follows. Nobody learns anything about society. The film wants only to run out its clock, and it does, and the watch on the pavement gets stepped on.