Soon to be retired Seattle Police Detective Burt Simpson (Dabney Coleman) is a fastidious man who makes it a point to keep his risks low and his plans high often to the annoyance of his best friend and partner Ernie Dills (Matt Frewer). When Burt goes in for some routine bloodwork as a pre-requisite for life insurance, a mix-up with another patient results in Burt being misdiagnosed with a terminal illness that will kill him in mere weeks. Wanting to provide for his ex-wife Carolyn (Teri Garr) and son Dougie (Kaj-Erik Eriksen), Burt pulls double duty in the hopes that taking on more dangerous criminals will lead to the lucrative payout for his survivors should he be killed in the line of duty. This puts him on a collision course with psychotic arms dealer Carl Stark (Xander Berkeley) who has stolen a large number of high end military weaponry.
Short Time is a 1990 action-comedy and directorial debut of Gregg Champion who'd previously worked as a producer on films such as Blue Thunder, Short Circuit, and Stakeout. Written by first time writers John Blumenthal and Michael Berry, the movie was filmed in Canada with a $9 million budget. When the film was released in May of 1990, it opened at #10 behind a number of holdovers such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pretty Woman, as well as the opening of Tales from the Darkside the movie and disappeared from theaters within two weeks. Critical reception was equally frosty with critics deriding the premise and Siskel & Ebert even called it one of the worst films of the year. For me personally I think the film has a really solid premise for a dark comedy, but it doesn't execute it all that well but I do recommend the movie because it is carried by Dabney Coleman's performance in the lead and some solid work by the ensemble.
Dabney Coleman is simultaneously really good in the movie as well as the primary reason it doesn't work. There's a sincerity to Coleman in all of his performances that the material surrounding him, regardless of the quality, never snuffs out (save for Hot to Trot, but that was doomed from the get go). Coleman is just really likable as an actor and while he is playing a typical straight laced cop archetype you do get very sincere scenes from Coleman with Frewer, Garr, and Eriksen as his best friend, ex-wife, and son respectively and you do find yourself getting invested in Burt as a character because of that sincerity. The movie also features some solid stunt and action work, particularly a lengthy car chase sequence where Burt engages in a high speed pursuit to ridiculous degrees as his vehicle deteriorates more and more as the chase goes on as he tries to goad the crooks into killing him.
Despite Coleman being very good in the movie, this leads to the major issue with the premise: Namely that it feels like it's played too light and too soft for material that when you step back and look at it is quite cruel and mean and is begging for the type of "black as pitch" humor you'd expect from Coen Brothers or Danny DeVito. The scenes where Burt realizes all his planning for his son's future and his retirement are out the window are quite sad and the moments of emotionally vulnerability like where he talks down a suicide bomber are played straight (and quite well) by Coleman but Coleman's so likable as a character that it becomes uncomfortable to laugh at the scenes where he's trying to get himself killed (he even goes to lengths to make sure there's no innocents or collateral damage). If the movie had been about a corrupt cop who was estranged from his ex-wife and son played by someone like Jack Nicholson or Harvey Keitel maybe the movie would've played better to critics and audiences as a way of stomaching the material. As is, Short Time plays itself like a conventional cop action-comedy that just happens to have a morbid premise.
I enjoyed Short Time for things that did genuinely work, but considering the rather bouncy and zany way the marketing pitched this movie only for audiences and critics to be subjected to scenes of genuine sadness crudely mixed in with buddy cop conventions of the era it makes sense to a degree why critics and audiences rejected the film. I certainly don't agree with Siskel and Ebert's assertion of this being one of the worst movies of 1990 (it probably wouldn't even make it to the top 30 of exclusively theatrical releases), but when the marketing promises a zanier experience than you get it can give the audience a sense of whiplash. Taken on its own and with the performances you get some really good moments, but it doesn't play them as well as they should.
