“Nick of Time” (1995)
We like to think of ourselves as cinephiles, and therefore you readers too, so we’ll assume you’ve already seen Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man” starring Depp as the fated accountant William Blake, which now a cult masterpiece, was Depp’s second-lowest-grossing starring vehicle of all time. But we can’t assume you bothered with “Nick of Time,” which was released the very same year. Directed by the largely unsung John Badham (“Saturday Night Fever,” “Blue Thunder,” “WarGames,” “Short Circuit,” “Stakeout”), it’s unclear what Depp was trying to achieve with the gimmicky thriller. Was it simply a studio paycheck gig for an actor who at the time, wasn’t really known for going that route? His agent trying to smooth out the increasingly deviating bumps in his career and diversify his portfolio? Who knows, but the role of Gene Watson, a mild-mannered widowed accountant who finds himself the wrong man in the wrong place is very sub-Hitchcockian and very un-Johnny Depp. He’s the unimpressive everyman forced into extraordinary circumstances, and this is a real outlier role as Depp was almost always adamant about not playing the hero, yet despite Gene Watson’s complete reluctance and forced hand, that’s undoubtedly what he is here. Noteworthy at the time for being set in “real time” (over the span of a few hours), Depp’s Watson is forced into a situation where he must kill a politician in order to save his kidnapped daughter, and if the premise sounds like banal studio fare, that’s because it is. Co-starring Christopher Walken in one of his least interesting supporting roles, Charles S. Dutton, Roma Maffia and character actors Marsha Mason, Peter Strauss, and G.D Spradlin, “Nick of Time” is an uninvolving, rote thriller. Further, it’s an unexceptional moment in Depp’s career with plot determining the acting and with none of his interesting textures or contours brought to enliven the proceedings (and for Badham it’s fairly incoherent directorially compared to his more classic earlier works). “Nick of Time” performed poorly for Paramount and generally received negative reviews from critics as well. So Depp may by nature have been averse to leading man roles, but it’s also clear that the Hollywood cookie cutter computation-bot ran the numbers and saw that the actor come up extremely short in this regard too. [D]
“The Astronaut’s Wife” (1999)
Rand Ravich’s career in relation to the success of “The Astronaut’s Wife”? Put it this way, this Johnny Depp-led science fiction/conspiracy thriller was Ravich’s first and only feature-length film. Presumably it landed him in maximum-security director’s jail explaining why he hasn’t left since. The ‘90s were Johnny Depp’s “try new things” phase, and flirting with studio roles in between Tim Burton films (“Sleepy Hollow” would arrive the same year), the actor took another fairly “straight” role, though “The Astronaut’s Wife” is noteworthy for being the first time he’d play a villain and his first foray into sci-fi (though the film’s sci-fi trappings are muted and the picture hews closer to psychologically claustrophobic conspiracy thriller). Aside from that, it’s hard to see what the appeal was. Depp stars as Spencer Armacost, one half of a pair of astronauts who lose communication with NASA for a crucial two minutes while repairing a satellite in Earth’s orbit. An explosion occurs, NASA loses them and when they somehow return to their ship and eventually to Earth, they are found prone and comatose. Charlize Theron plays Jillian Armacost, Spencer’s wife, who is horrified by the news but happy to learn her husband is alive. But NASA Capt. Alex Streck (Nick Cassavetes) and his wife Natalie (Donna Murphy) aren’t so lucky and after they return to Earth, Streck suffers an unexpected stroke and dies while his wife commits suicide soon thereafter. Something also seems to be up with Spencer, who has now quit NASA and taken an executive position at a powerful corporation in New York—it seems he’s just not quite the same person he was before… Playing would-be Hitchockian cat and mouse games, “The Astronaut’s Wife” is largely your standard operating procedure conspiracy thriller until it turns sillier with its sci-fi-ish non-surprise (which is pretty clear to anyone who watched the original trailer, hence the lack of true suspense throughout). Largely forgettable, it was as if audiences just wouldn’t cotton to Johnny Depp unless he was playing one his trademark outlandish characters. Made by New Line for $75 million (his biggest film to date aside from “Sleepy Hollow”), “The Astronaut’s Wife” was a huge flop, grossing just $10 million domestically. And not that these things matter that much, but the thriller also has the distinction of having the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of any Johnny Depp film at 16%. [D]
