After Dark, My Sweet (1990)

Film-Noir Scholars (and that includes the evolutionary sub-genre Neo-Noir) seem to Love this Jim Thompson Adaptation Directed by James Foley. The Director is at Home with this Type of Thing, but here He delivers a rather Weak and Unstylish Film.Style is Essential to Film-Noir. It's Best when Wrapped up in Surreal Flourishes that give the Sense of a World Off Its Axis, Out of its Orbit, and destined for Oblivion. Cynical Characters and Snappy Patter also work to Make the Noir World Accessible to Outsiders Peeking in on the Doomed Characters.None of that is Evident Here Except On Occasion and in Spurts. One of the Weakest Elements is the Miscasting of Rachel Ward. She looks Anemic and Awful and Hardly the Sex Magnet She is Playing. After the initial Scene in the Bar, She Loses Her Edge and Vacillates wildly in Attitude and Behavior. Jason Patric Fares much Better and Bruce Dern is Expectedly Eccentric and Scary.But the Plot is Muddled, the Kidnapping Never is Convincing and the follow-up Third-Act is All Over the Place. It's an Awkward Movie that is Never as Compelling as its Pretensions, starting with a Title that is Nonsensical. Overall, Hardly One of the Best Neo-Noirs and is about to Below Average, although as Stated above some Credentialed Critics Disagree.You Might want to Check This One Out, it's Not Awful, and Make Up Your Own Mind about its Value as a Top-Notch Neo-Noir and as an Entertainment.

I saw this film during the 1990's and I was really disappointed. It seemed to go on forever and the main storyline, about the kidnapping, was just a backdrop for dull characters who never stop talking and their boring, ill-chosen lives. It has to do with an washed-up ex-boxer who escapes form a mental hospital and drifts into a kidnapping plot for quick cash which goes awry. After that happens, we wait for something interesting to happen. Very little does and nearly all of it is dull. The action is virtually non-existent and the murders are devoid of suspense. The film began well enough and the locations are very well chosen and photographed. But very little was done with them. The acting is passable, but that's all. I have no desire to see this movie again.

After Dark, My Sweet is a film with a classic noir set-up: a desperate man teams up with a violent drifter and an alcoholic widow to kidnap a rich child. Director James Foley takes this plot and makes the best film that could possibly have been made with an already good premise. It helps that this is based on a short novel by Jim Thompson, a writer whose pulpy crime plots-which focus more on twisted characters than plot details-seem to work especially well on the screen.The main character here is ex-boxer Kid Collins, a drifter who is troubled by an incident from his past. He's so troubled that he seems strange to everyone he encounters; this inspires extreme reactions so that people he has just met are equally as likely to try physical violence on him as they are to try to take him home. His skewed perspective is especially well represented by scenes that suddenly end with jarring transitions that seem to strike like lightning. Troubled as he is, he usually seems to have the best interests of others at heart. Given a chance to escape the plot he's about to be pulled into, he refuses it because he sees a chance for a real connection with the widow.So, this film has all the best elements of noir: a troubled anti-hero, a desperate criminal plot, and a sense of weary inevitability in the way the plot unfolds. The visuals, editing, direction, and acting are all top notch and this has one of those great endings that gives the viewer a new way to look at everything that has happened before. This compares well with the best noir and neo-noir films ever made; in fact, I'm shocked by its obscurity.

A film so insecure the creaters perhaps hoped to milk an original film noir classic title, "Farewell My Lovely", thinking the gullible would assume it a remake. The characters are so foul and unappealing that it deserved its cold reception when first released. Time only adds to it its absurdity. Having none of the guile, cinematography, desperation or despair of classic noir it relied instead on a convoluted and senseless crime plot that would have easily resulted in several arrests within hours. As if that weren't enough it threw in an utterly sexless attempt at erotica in which at least one of the participants hadn't bothered to bathe in several days. This only made this mess all the more painful to watch. Find a good classic forties or fifties film noir instead of wasting two hours on this failure.