MovieChat Forums > 5ive Days to Midnight (2004) Discussion > Please, Please, Shoot Him!

Please, Please, Shoot Him!

posted 17 years ago by Cate1956
2 replies | jump to latest

I love Timothy Hutton, I think he is a gifted actor and he truly does well with the material given him in this sodden mini-series. But his Physics Professor character J.T. Neumeyer is so arrogant, so ungrateful, so self involved (I know he is trying to stop his own murder so I understand his need for urgency, but that doesn't mean he has to act like a tool) that I am pretty sure I would have been on his list of suspects too, given his nasty, snippy attitude toward those he has ordered to help him.

From his student, to his brother-in-law, to his shady girlfriend and the grisly policeman "investigating" his case (tee hee...get it? Case? Briefcase?)JT Neumeyer is surrounded by the usual suspects, shady characters required for this kind of mini-series, one that tells a story in four episodes that could have been wrapped up in a 5ive minutes and that is including the commercials.

So goes the writing. Thankfully, the acting is good. Gage Golightly as Neumeyer's young daughter (Mom is dead, of course...too bad she didn't have the advantage of a briefcase to foretell her demise) is sweet, cute and engaging. The two actor's work well with one another, Hutton as the drippy Dad who takes himself way too seriously and Golightly as the precocious child that believes in her Daddy, even when he has to drive her to school in a Nissan Altima rental (for a hobby, count the endorsements while watching this film) after his truck and then his rental SUV were involved in various types of vehicular mishaps. Even cell phones aren't safe when involved with the likes of J.T. Neumeyer and his merry band of suspects. Hope Jesse remembers to hide the telescope!

I could go on forever, but I better take 5ive.

My recommendation for "5ive Days to Midnight?" Grab the Spark Notes, read the spoilers, fast forward to the end. If you do that, then that precious time in your life spent watching 5ive hours of dreck rescuing Professor J. Tool Neumeyer will be saved in the end.

[–] fjord_fox 15 years ago

Gee! Does all that mean that you didn't like it? Instead of writing all that, you could have summed it up in only four words: I didn't like it. :-)

I didn't see the Professor the way you described him. You referred to him as being "so arrogant, so ungrateful, so self-involved" and you comment on him as having a "nasty, snippy attitude toward those he has ordered to help him", but how would you be if you were in his place? and suppose that time was ticking down, so you could see that you constantly had less and less time before you knew you were going to die if you couldn't get anything done—and things weren't happening quickly enough?

I think my long post in the thread called "Question about the ending SPOILER" will put a different light on most of what you described.

I am just wondering... Do you like time travel movies? or do you think they are crazy and foolish? Have you seen the "Back to the Future" series, or "The Time Machine (2002), "Time After Time", "Bill & Ted", "Casablanca", "Somewhere in Time"? What did you think of them? Do you think that, with all the technology that we have been able to come up with thus far, that we are capable of inventing a time machine? or do you think that is just plain silliness?

I am not asking out of sarcasm. My point is that if you do like time travel movies, then you wouldn't be making a post like this, because you would understand why the professor had all those attitudes when he could see that time—his time to live—was ticking down and things weren't happening quickly enough for him to try to stop what he knew was going to happen—his death.

Before I saw this movie, I had already seen the "Back to the Future" series and "The Time Machine (2002)" and I had read the book, "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells and when I saw this series, I thoroughly enjoyed it because there were so many references to those movies. Maybe if you were to see those movies too and then come back to this series, you would enjoy it more. I think so because those movies EXPLAIN the concepts of time travel—whereas this serics ASSUMES that you already know them.

[–] cuckookazoo 14 years ago

"Casablanca" is a time travel movie ? ?