Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

GamerTab That was an excellent one.

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Robert J. Maxwell In contention for one of the dumbest titles of the year. "After Dark, My Sweet," which has absolutely nothing to do with the plot and which sounds like a Zucker brothers parody, a combination of "Wait Until Dark" and "Murder, My Sweet." Actually it's considerably better than that. I didn't mind the narration by a dead man. That's an established convention by now, shocking though it may have been in 1950's "Sunset Boulevard." The story has Jason Patric, who doesn't seem to know how to spell his last name, as a washed-up ex boxer, working from place to place as a handyman, until he winds up at the desert spread of widow Rachel Ward, who welcomes him with open arms except that they don't quite open. Through her, he meets a dodgy old character, Bruce Dern.Ward and Dern have cooked up a kidnapping scheme. They'll nab the little boy of a rich family, secrete him in Ward's house, and collect a king's ransom before returning him. But, as usual in these schemes, the center cannot hold, things fall apart. Everybody appears to be on the verge of double crossing everybody else. There's an automatic pistol that changes hands. To make things more complicated, the kid is a diabetic.The cute little sick boy is played by James Cotton. He's a sweet kid. He only says a few lines, and doesn't complain even when he's going into shock. This is in strict contrast to my own boy who, at that age, would never shut up. I had to beat him senseless to keep him quiet, but it worked. He hasn't spoken to me in twenty years but I understand his mime act is widely celebrated in Europe.Jason Patric does pretty well by the role of the slouching, disheveled, not-quite-all-there patsy, taciturn and suspicious. Rachel Ward gives a highly animated performance that contrasts nicely with Patric's reticence. Bruce Dern toggles between astonishment and supreme confidence.Best performance: George Dickerson as the well-meaning but meddling Doctor Goldberg, a paragon of probity. His expression bleeds with bourgeois concern. He NEEDS to help you. He was equally believable in an evil role in "The Parallax View." I found the story itself confusing. I don't know why the guy was who put a hole through Bruce Dern, or why. I still don't know what was going on in Rachel Ward's mind. And Patric himself is an enigma, despite the philosophical mutterings.Yet the film is involving. There's a scene in which Patric, dressed in rags, tumbles off the back of a truck he's been riding on, lights on the lavender sand of a bleak desert at twilight, and breaks the bottle of wine he has stashed in his jacket. He stumbles to his feet and listens to the silent wasteland. It's the kind of desperation I've been trying to avoid all my life.

sfdphd This film is in the Film Noir Encyclopedia under neo-noir, but all of the other films I've seen so far in that category are much better than this one. I'm not sure if it's the fault of the original material or the screenplay or the director or the actor Jason Patric, but the lead character is not at all engaging and his apparent mental problem that disappears partway through is confusing. The femme fatale was interesting in the beginning as she was spinning her web, but then she got soft and mushy and the inconsistency was a let-down. The ending is the only good thing about the film. The ending explains why the Jason Patric character has been acting so strangely but the last 5 minutes could not change my opinion that the film is a waste of time. There are so many better films to see...

chaos-rampant I saw this as part of my cinematic Jim Thompson quest.It's a subject of debate whether or not neo noir is really, importantly noir. What used to be a type of film that spoke of a life in the city as disorienting and the beginning of illusions in the mind born from it, is now merely a template and what used to be a socially conscious film that directly addressed the fabric of its world is now only cinematically conscious maneuvre. Neo noir is not so much an expression then as it is an idiom.This is an intriguing study of that noir cosmos in cinematic terms.We have the hapless ex-boxer schmuck who's taken one too many beatings in the ring enter a world that seems to be lying in wait for him, specifically him to set it in motion. He's foiled in an ensuing kidnap scheme, so far a traditional noir device where the fates pull the strings. Here comes the revision though.By becoming aware of another scheme to which he is the victim, he's no longer swept up in this world. The movie then presents us with a situation where by effecting control upon that pre-existing world, by realizing that he's part of a noir narrative and that he won't simply consign to be the cog, he imagines his own noir narrative in which the woman, his only chance for redemption, can be nothing else but the femme fatale.This idea is born in him out of suspicion for a world he sees where no one cares or loves. This world, which the femme fatale codifies with her presence in film noir, is here refuted by the actual woman thought to be the femme fatale - instead, she represents the salvation of a genuine contact.We share for all this his point of view. Meaning his shifting role from puppet to puppeteer is experienced internally. This is the difference for me between the lesser neo-noirs, mere ornamental homages like Body Heat or LA Confidential, and the important ones. That what used to be experienced as a cruel world in traditional film noir is now transferred inside the mind, where the noir conventions manifest as illusions and chimeras. Lynch does this in his films and also Memento. In a roundabout way, these films (especially Lynch) give us the genesis of noir inside the head of the author, the creation myth behind the world where the hapless shmuck is foiled by the fates.The intelligent design of this is greatly hampered by a last minute twist, a simple cruelty as we often find in Jim Thompson. He was adept at the randomly cruel potboiler where morality is a thin veneer violently scraped away, but here I find it stands in the way.

merklekranz Three losers, a dirty ex-cop (Bruce Dern), an alcoholic seductress (Rachel Ward), and a punchy boxer (Jason Patric) become entwined in a botched kidnapping caper. Believe no one, trust no one, especially your partners in the crime. The story unfolds entirely from the viewpoint of the three kidnappers. "After Dark My Sweet" is slow, but never boring or predictable. I can't say I was totally satisfied with the outcome, and some plot threads dangle uncomfortably. Nevertheless, a better than average noir film, with competent character development and acting, nice photography, and interesting musical score. Marginally recommended. - MERK