Time to Kill - Why was this so hard to find?

I was really expecting to watch this movie more or less against my will.

It basically stands as the second hardest item in Nicolas Cage's filmography, and since it was shot/released after he had more or less become established, I assumed that this was because it sucked a lot.

However, I'm pretty confident in my opinion that anyone who tells you that this movie was absolutely terrible has A) limited ability to assess films in general or B) never seen Vampire's Kiss or Moonstruck.

Now, that's not to say that there aren't some pretty serious issues with this movie. Because there are. But luckily, especially in light of Vampire's Kiss, they don't really have anything to do with Cage, who turns in a pretty decent performance, all things considered. Actually, forget that last clause. He's just good in it.

Basically the story's set in Africa, during the Italio-Abyssinian war in the 1930s, and Cage plays Lieutenant Silvestri, a man with a bad toothache. The toothache causes him to up and leave camp, only to have his truck run off the road, sending him to find a doctor on foot. Taking a "shortcut" back to camp, he comes across an idyllic waterfall populated by a single bathing Ethiopian woman, who he proceeds to rape, but then ends up having a genuine relationship with her (I should note here - whether or not this comes as a surprise to anyone - that the movie is based on a novel written by an Italian), only to accidentally shoot her in the stomach while trying to fend off a hyena in the middle of the night.

After burying her, he spends the rest of the movie psychologically crippled. While a cursory read-through of most synopses would have you believe that this is simply because he believes that she had leprosy, which he caught from her, I disagree. That's definitely part of it, and it weighs on him heavily, but I do think that there's genuine grief at her death there. I don't feel like spoilers on a movie this obscure and hard to find are a thing, but skip to the next paragraph if you disagree. The fact that his ultimate moment of relief comes from his reconciliation with her father, and their proper burial of her, is a dead giveaway.

I found another blog tracing the filmography of Cage (it only actually appears to have gotten to Time to Kill, but I don't know that the author was going in order) that seems to have found the movie itself very perplexing and bizarre, but narrative-wise it didn't strike me as particularly obtuse. It follows a series of flashbacks as presented by Silvestri to his army chum, so it's a bit disjointed, but other than that it flows pretty well.

I didn't mind this movie at all.

Oh, and he makes a chameleon smoke at one point. So there's that, too.