People think I'm kidding when I say that Steven Spielberg is evil. They think maybe I just don't like his tendency to rely on the bombastic scores of John Williams or that I want to demonstrate my F/X savvy by pointing out the poor shading in his computer-generated dinosaurs.

But I really think he's evil, a genuinely destructive force on society. Spielberg is dangerous because he is good at what he does, which allows him to exert undue influence on people like John Badham, the director of Nick of Time. But what makes him evil is the way he manages to force people to feast on the most exhausted of cinematic cliches.

Nick of Time is an awful movie because it capitalizes on two of the lessons that Spielberg has been trying to teach the American public for decades: 1) Black people--particularly innocent black people--are meant to die; and 2) Women are helpless, mindless creatures that cannot be reasoned with and that can be relied upon to fall down for no apparent reason at the critical moment in any chase scene.

Before we get off on the wrong foot here, let me make it very clear that I am not coming at this from the PC perspective. I have no patience whatsoever for the PC perspective. I don't hate Polack jokes because they're insensitive; I hate them because they're not funny. Most PC people are the kind of people who have to make an effort not to like Polack jokes because political correctness appears to be designed for precisely the sort of mindless, humorless drones who are capable of finding it funny that the punchline to every Polack joke ever written is the same: "See, Polacks are stupid!"

Similarly, it isn't the feminist in me that wants to take directors like Spielberg and Badham to task for having women dissolve into quivering mounds of jelly whenever they need most to keep their wits about them. It's the moviegoer in me that objects to seeing that same old tired song and dance once again. Couldn't we please just have a fifteen minute break from the high heels breaking or the purse catching on a tree or the woman herself fainting dead away in mid-stride because, well, she's a woman and we all know how they are?

Nick of Time is a stupid movie that doesn't have to be stupid, but insists on being stupid despite itself. It is the story of Gene Watson (Johnny Depp), who is abducted, along with his daughter Lynn (Courtney Chase) by Mr. Smith (Christopher Walken). The evil Smith orders the hapless Watson (a CPA returning from a funeral in San Diego) to murder a gubernatorial candidate by 1:30 that afternoon. If the candidate is still alive, little Lynn will be killed.

Watson assumes that if he murders the candidate, he himself will be shot. But that will be okay because Mr. Smith will let poor little Lynn go. We know that he will let Lynn go because he says so. Watson has no choice but to trust Smith; and the director tries to distract us with the question of what we would do in Watson's place.

But it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the real question concerns Mr. Smith. What is his motivation for doing this to Watson? What makes him think it will work? That point won't be addressed until much later, when the viewer will have to choose between accepting an incredibly lame explanation and acknowledging that the last hour of his life has been wasted.

On our way to an absurd conclusion that depends upon Watson's ability to plot a course of action based on a single snippet of information that he gets one minute before his deadline (after having frittered away more than an hour in sulking and wandering around aimlessly), we get some pretty silly action sequences. One turns out to be a dream sequence (which would have been brilliant if it had appeared in a better context, as it is a sort of mockery of the action-hero-method of extricating oneself from a problem by shooting at all enemies with pinpoint accuracy). Another moment of high drama involves the brutal execution of the only innocent bystander to be killed in the film. She's black, of course.

Watson also manages to get a word with the gubernatorial candidate, whose very politically charged name is Eleanor S. Grant. He explains to her that her assistant (the black woman) has been killed and that Grant's own husband is involved in a plot to have her assassinated while she delivers her speech later that afternoon.

She tests the truth of his assertion by trying to excuse herself from the speech. But her husband simply won't let the point go. He insists (diplomatically, of course) that she go through with it. Then she asks him to send in her assistant. He says that he has sent her on an errand.

Being warned was not enough. Establishing a good deal of credibility for the warning is not enough either. Eleanor S. Grant is a woman, after all. And she knows how women are. They overreact to things. They get carried away with all kinds of crazy stories about assassinations and dead assistants. She decides to go through with the speech.

We might suppose that she has privately formulated some sort of plan. We might suspect that when the guns begin to go off, she will be ready for them in some unexpected way. I have to say I wasn't very impressed with her plan, which was to put her hands delicately to her face and scream idiotically before collapsing.

Since this movie is a Spielberg clone, I needn't point out that everything works out in the end for reasons that are never made entirely clear. But we do learn that the black man who manages to save Watson's daughter is allowed to live.

I guess that's a certain kind of progress. It's just not the kind that's worth watching.



Recommended: No