The Terminator’s Michael Biehn took the lead in 1991’s Timebomb – a B-thriller that shows what a charismatic, intense actor he can be.
The very same year his cameo as Kyle Reese was trimmed out of Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s theatrical cut, Michael Biehn finally got a deserved leading role – albeit in one of the weirder films in his long career. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, 1991’s Timebomb isn’t a lost classic, but it absolutely is a reminder of what a terrific actor Biehn was in his 1980s and 90s prime. In a more just Hollywood, he would have been an out-and-out movie star.
Biehn plays Eddy Kay, a quiet watch repairer who’s so nice that it almost seems a bit odd that he’s single. Instead, he lives in a crummy single-room apartment with nothing in it other than a distractingly comprehensive selection of jigsaw puzzles.
He seems to keep in unfeasibly good shape by doing sit-ups and cycling to and from the repair shop where he works. He’s helpful and kind to his neighbours, and when disaster strikes, doesn’t think twice about leaping into action.
While eating dinner at a diner one evening, an apartment on the other side of the road explodes. “Gas leak!” a burning man screams, before leaping from a ledge and into a crate of watermelons. Kay rushes into the flames and rescues a trapped parent and child – an act that puts him on the local news. This in turn catches the eye of a clandestine organisation of saboteurs and assassins, who start talking about Kay as though he isn’t some watch-repairing doormat, but actually a member of their secret murder club.
It’s a setup not unlike David Cronenberg’s later A History Of Violence (2005), in which Viggo Mortensen’s unassuming family man makes headlines when he kills two hoodlums who try to rob his small town diner. Or Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity, in which Matt Damon plays a former CIA operative with no memory of his past. Screenwriter and director Avi Nesher may have been influenced by Robert Ludlum’s Bourne novels (the first one was published in the 1980) when he wrote Timebomb, or maybe he had in mind 1990’s Total Recall – based on a short story by Philip K Dick, it was also about spies, murderers and wiped memories.
Whatever its creative origins, Timebomb is proof that some concepts are so rock-solid that they can be retold in a multitude of ways, and by filmmakers of differing skill levels. Here, Kay becomes the target of a group of hard-staring villains that includes veteran actor Richard Jordan and future Tai Bo inventor Billy Blanks. As Kay avoids their attention, digs into his past and tries to foil an assassination plot, he’s joined by a bespectacled Patsy Kensit, here playing a psychologist.
It’s all pot-boiling stuff, but Nesher – making his first American movie – shows some real flashes of cinematic inspiration here and there. An eerily sombre opening – a long, low tracking shot involving an empty hotel ballroom – has echoes of The Shining or the film Kubrick referenced while making it, Last Year At Marienbad.
There are some good action sequences, too: Nesher favours automatic firearms with those huge muzzle flashes we seldom see in films these days. We aren’t talking John Woo levels of style or creativity, but the best scenes at least have some visceral oomph – especially a midpoint hit job in a darkened hospital.
In other scenes, though, Timebomb bimbles cheerfully into accidental hilariousness. There’s a dreamy flashback sequence – in which everything in the frame has been artfully coloured white – supposedly set on a train somewhere in Hungary. It looks quite unsettling, at least until Biehn is asked to utter the line (subtitled into English), “I don’t have eggs, only sausages.”
When Timebomb isn’t being goofy, it tends towards the sleazy (full-frontal nudity sold tickets back then) or the downright bizarre. Bottles of Evian mineral water are shown so prominently in a couple of scenes that it initially looks like deliberate product placement. But then Kay uses a bottle of the company’s water as an impromptu silencer so he can shoot a female assassin in the leg. It’s doubtful that Evian would have wanted its brand associated with gun torture, but maybe things were more relaxed in the 1990s.
Even as the film conspires to make him look very silly indeed, Biehn remains commendably dedicated to his craft. But then, he always had this brilliant intensity to his performances that made him unpredictable and hypnotic to watch. People really don’t talk enough about how good Biehn is in The Terminator – how well he sells the potentially batty idea of being a time-travelling soldier assigned to protest a scooter-riding waitress. When he talks about the deadliness of the T-101 cyborg he’s pitted against – “He will not stop, ever, until you are dead” – it’s delivered with such force that the truth of it seems undeniable.
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Look too at his Corporal Dwayne Hicks in Aliens. What could have been a forgettable love interest role – second fiddle to the supremely charismatic Sigourney Weaver – instead becomes one of the film’s most contained, likeable characters. Where the other Marines go big and loud, Hicks is quiet and cautious. Biehn plays him as a smart, shrewd operator who, in a macho profession, chooses not to advertise his intelligence too loudly.
This is contrasted smartly in The Abyss, where he plays the increasingly deranged Navy SEAL Lieutenant Coffey. Here, Biehn gets to let all that coiled intensity spring out all over the place, and he gives the character real menace. James Cameron appears to recognise the unpredictable quality in Biehn, letting the actor’s energy fill The Abyss’s watery, disaster-filled third act. (On a re-watch, it’s noticeable how quickly the tension ebbs once Biehn is wrenched out of the picture.)
It’s said that Biehn’s performance in The Abyss was what prompted Nesher to think of him for Timebomb. And in a film with some questionable casting choices, putting Biehn in the lead was a moment of genuine inspiration. At the start of the movie, Biehn compresses all his energy down into a kind of shy social awkwardness – just look at the mixture of nervousness and eagerness to please he displays when Patsy Kensit shows up at his workshop, looking for someone to fix her departed father’s watch.
If Timebomb truly succeeds anywhere, it’s in Kay’s journey from everyman to machine gun-wielding super spy. Lots of movies have tried to show off the same transition and failed; Timebomb’s works, and it works almost entirely because of Biehn. He can effortlessly play the part of the handsome nice guy, putting on a pure white shirt and biking to work; he can also play a mean antihero, fighting goons in seedy hotels and shooting them in the legs to extract information.
In a distinctly average thriller of its vintage, Michael Biehn’s chameleon-like performance is by far Timebomb’s strongest asset. The title could even be a reference to the actor himself.
Timebomb is available to stream now on Prime Video UK.
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