What do Time to Kill (1989) and Fire Birds (1990) have in common besides both starring Nicolas Cage? They’re both incredibly uninspired, and pretty boring. The worst thing a movie can be is a chore to watch, and more than any movies I’ve covered thus far, these films are a slog to get through. It wasn’t worth my time to watch them, and so it’s not worth my time to write an essay on each of them. I guess I could just skip ahead a few films, go straight to Wild at Heart, but if there’s anything I like more than talking about movies, it’s talking shit about movies. And so, for this essay, I’m going to do a shallow dive into Giuliano Montaldo’s Time to Kill and David Green’s Fire Birds, both starring a Nicolas Cage acting duller than ever before (and hopefully, ever again).
Time to Kill
Based on a novel by Ennio Flaiano, an Italian novelist and screenwriter who co-wrote many of Federico Fellini’s famous films, Time to Kill (Tempo di uccidere) stars Nicolas Cage as Enrico Silvestri, an Italian fascist lieutenant based in Ethiopia during the 1936 Italian invasion. There’s little information about the making of this film that’s easily accessible (and that isn’t just other people’s attempts to go through Cage’s filmography), so there’s no explanation as to why Nicolas Cage is starring in an Italian production, or why that production is mostly dubbed in English. * Most likely Cage’s agent thought it would be good for him to have a European film on his resume, and the Italian filmmakers probably thought it would be beneficial to have a Hollywood star in the lead. Given the film’s obscurity, I don’t think either of those hypothetical scenarios panned out.
*The YouTube copy that was probably used by most people who have seen this movie in the past few years contains some scenes in Italian inexplicably spliced in.
The film starts with Silvestri’s attempts to find a doctor to treat his toothache. He gets lost on his way back to his main camp and encounters an Ethiopian woman, Mariam, bathing in a waterfall, and he proceeds to rape her – after, she falls in love with him and they spend the night together. During the night, Silvestri shoots at a hyena threatening the two, and the bullet ricochets off a rock and hits Mariam in the gut, a fatal wound(near the end of the film it’s revealed that, rather than attempting to find help, Silvestri killed her so that she wouldn’t suffer all night from the wound). The guilt consumes him for the rest of the film as Silvestri attempts to leave Ethiopia. After discovering that white turbans indicate that the wearer suffers from leprosy, Silvestri is convinced that a wound on his hand that won’t heal is early on-set leprosy he got from Mariam. He becomes increasingly desperate to return to Italy. He nearly murders a doctor and ends up stealing money from his former commanding officer. He eventually hides at the house of Mariam’s father, Johannes, and confesses his guilt over killing Mariam. Johannes forgives him and tells him Mariam didn’t have leprosy. The film ends with Ethiopia’s annexation by Italy and with Silvestri able to go home. *
*Some more stuff happens, but it’s not worth the time to go into all the different characters – go watch it on Youtube if you’re curious. For best results, 1.5 speed.
The novel Time to Kill is based on was written in 1947, pretty soon after the end of World War II, and so the story’s condemnation of imperialism probably felt pretty prescient at the time (as well as the existential themes that were all the rage back then). the film version having updated very little of the plot to reflect more modern notions of imperialism and the role of culture in propagating it. I can’t speak for the novel — for all I know it’s incredibly insightful even for 21st century post-colonial theorists — but the film, released in 1989, can’t help but feel dated. The plot does little to reflect more modern notions of imperialism and the role of culture in propagating it. To put it bluntly, it’s pretty racist. Not in the sense that it has racist characters doing racist things (which, I mean, since it’s about fascists, it does), but it doesn’t do anything beyond condemning the racism present. It essentially says “racism and imperialism are bad,” but then uses the same tools that racism and imperialism use when creating art that portrays other cultures and races as ‘other’ and lesser.
Like, what exactly is the point of the movie? That Silvestri learns to see Ethiopians as people? That doesn’t change the fact that he’s a fascist, or that he’s actively involved in the process of colonization (even if he’s doing it half-heartedly). The existentialist themes aren’t elaborated upon enough to take precedent, and even if they were, there’s countless other movies and works of art that talk about the meaning or meaningless of life that don’t engage uncritically in colonial tropes and stereotypes.
Cage is surprisingly tame given the role. Especially coming off of Vampire’s Kiss, you’d expect freak outs on freak outs. Instead, we get pretty ‘realistic’ acting – lots of stares into the distance, tonally consistent speech patterns, yelling only when a person would actually yell. There’s a bit of screaming here and there, but for the most part, because so much of Silvestri’s conflict is internal, Cage does most of his suffering with his eyes. In a better movie, the acting would probably be considered ‘good,’ but in Time to Kill, it’s hard not to wish for a more exaggerated performance, regardless of whether or not it would fit. I’m pretty sure all his lines are dubbed over (no clue why), so something feels off the whole time. Silvestri as a character is pretty despicable (one of the first things we watch him do is sexually assault someone), and without a genuine ‘Cage’ Cage performance, there’s not much to hold onto.
The film isn’t badly made, it just bleh-ly made, the sort of standard cookie-cutter adequateness that films with better developed stories and politics and meanings could get away with. Here, it just comes off as boring and uninteresting. The film doesn’t seem to care about doing anything interesting, hedging all its bets on a story that isn’t able to say anything about colonialism or existentialism that hasn’t been said by every riff on Heart of Darkness or The Stranger. Maybe it would have packed a punch had it been made in the ‘50s, but what we get is a very stale ‘80s movie.
Fire Birds
Speaking of stale ‘80s movies. I complained briefly about the sub-par politics of Time to Kill, but Fire Birds makes it look like an anti-imperialist masterpiece. Fire Birds goes a step beyond most pro-Army propaganda action films and starts with a quote from then-president George H.W. Bush, known for, among other things, pushing for CIA involvement in escalating the War on Drugs.
The film concerns a joint operation by the DEA and the US Army to take out a drug cartel in South America that currently has a hired gun known for his skills using attack helicopters. Nic Cage plays Jake Preston, a hotshot Tom Cruise rip off who’s good at flying Apache helicopters but sort of a loose cannon; Tommy Lee Jones plays a tough-talking flight instructor named Brad Little who takes a shine towards Preston. A weirdly large amount of the movie is about Little teaching Preston to get over his eye dominance disability which Little had suffered as a pilot as well. There’s also a romance between Preston and Sean Young’s Billie Lee Guthrie, a scout pilot and Preston’s ex-girlfriend who dumped him because he wanted her to be a housewife.* The movie ends as expected: Preston takes out the cartel’s helicopter pilot after losing the guy kills his best friend and the DEA takes out the cartel. If you want to know more about this movie, go watch Top Gun; I’ve never seen it but I’ve heard it’s a much better movie than this waste of time.
*According to my notes, the two share a generic sex scene at some point, so if you want to see some Nic Cage ass check out this movie.
Apart from the cliched plot and dialogue, and the extremely propagandistic aspects, the worst part about the movie is that helicopters are boring. Listen, I would never ride in a helicopter, they seem like the stupidest and most dangerous mode of transportation possible, but god are they boring to watch. There’s a reason why people make airplane movies and not helicopter movies. It’s just hard to tell what’s going on — perhaps that’s also the fault of the film’s useless direction. The (surprisingly few) helicopter battles are visually incomprehensible. You can’t tell who’s flying what, who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy, which helicopter is which. It’s all a jumbled mess punctuated by reaction shots. When action scenes are badly made, man are they boring.
All the actors are phoning it in, though it doesn’t help that the script feels like a first-draft spec script written by a 12-year-old that’s a bit too into the US military. Tommy Lee Jones does his fast-talking voice of authority throughout the film with little discretion, and Sean Young tries to give her barely written character a personality but it’s not enough. The other actors are your average filler actions dudes.
Cage does what he can to add some zest to his role but at best, it’s a boring performance, and at worst, it’s a pale imitation of young Tom Cruise. At some point, he begins to take on some of Jones’s drawl. It’s a performance so unremarkable, it’s hard to recommend to even a Cage aficionado. You honestly can’t blame the guy for not making the movie interesting – it’s a gargantuan task to take this dull of a movie and keep the audience awake, a task he won’t be ready to tackle for at least another ten years. The most watchable scene is one that takes entirely in an early ‘90s videogame helicopter simulator, but that’s only because of the novelty of seeing a film take seriously the graphics of an old video game and because Cage yells “I’m the greatest” progressively louder the whole time.
The film suffers from cash-grab-itis brought on by the success of Top Gun and a complete lack of originality, inspiration, and soul. The whole thing has the pacing of a videogame tutorial, the part that forces you to learn all the controls very slowly and that you would skip if you could. The characters are caricatures, the action dull, the cinematography flat, the direction boring. The kind of movie that even someone transported in time from 1910 would find stupid and unimaginative. Were this to be made today, it would be released on Netflix and watched only by conservative dads obsessed with Benghazi and Rambo 3. Even the film’s evil politics are so diluted and back-watered as to be downright inoffensive.
Are the movies good?
Absolutely not. I could see maybe from redemption for Time to Kill if you’ve never gone through any reflection on the negative consequences of colonialism, but even then, you’d have to excuse rape. Fire Birds is cinematic equivalent of a frat bro in a Reagan/Bush hat – evil, but easily replaceable and boring.
Is Nicolas Cage good?
It really depends on what you mean by ‘good.’ Scour the youtube comments of Time to Kill and you’ll see a lot of people saying a variation of ‘he’s surprisingly good in this.’ It’s true he gives a more naturalistic performance than usual. When it comes to that kind of performance though, you really need a good film around it, otherwise it just falls flat and boring. For example, Vampire’s Kiss was not a good movie, but the performance was pretty incredible – the extravagance of it was able to transcend the flimsy material. Cage’s attempt to be naturalistic and fade into the film instead of stand out fails because of how mediocre the surrounding film is. As for Fire Birds, there’s some fun moments, but all the performances, including Cage’s, are the same quality as a bad TV pilot. I can’t recommend Fire Birds less.
Is Nicolas Cage hot?
In Time to Kill, Cage spends most of the time looking very sweaty and being a fascist, so it’s hard to say whether or not he’s hot. I’m going to lean towards no. His receding hairline is getting kind of bad in this one. For whatever reason, Cage’s hair is darker than usual in Fire Birds, and it only reinforces my belief that he wants to be Tom Cruise in Top Gun. He doesn’t look bad, but he’s not exactly at the level of eye candy that will distract you from the rest of the movie. Plus he’s a huge narc in it.
Best Rage Cage moments
Unfortunately, both films lack much in the rage department. There’s a scene in Time to Kill where Cage gets a tooth pulled that’s as close as we can get. The best screaming scene in Fire Birds is also the best scene in the whole movie. I mentioned it above but here’s the clip (honestly the only thing you need to watch from this movie).
Every Nicolas Cage Movie 
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