Nervous Ticks (1992)

User Rating:

5.2/10   

Director:

Rocky Lang

Writer (WGA):

David Frankel (written by)

Release Date:

3 September 1993 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Romance

Tagline:

For 90 minutes, York Daley's life will be a living hell... And you get to watch!

Plot:

Man finds out from his mistress that she had confessed their affair to her husband who went to man's home to kill him. The man wants to avoid any conflict, but the mistress has an opposite plan. A long night has just begun. |

Plot Keywords:

Independent Film

Cast

Bill Pullman	...	York Daley
Julie Brown	...	Nancy Rudman
Peter Boyle	...	Ron Rudman
Brent Jennings	...	Cole
James LeGros	...	Rusty
Paxton Whitehead	...	Cheshire
Josh Mostel	...	Saul Warshow
Cathy Ladman	...	Sonya Warshow
Gerald Papasyan	...	Seve
Nancy Fish	...	Mrs. Fennel
Claire Stansfield	...	Lu
Zoe Trilling	...	Marci
Lauren Lane	...	Blonde
Prince Hughes	...	Ned
Lenore Kasdorf	...	Katie

Runtime:

95 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

Iceland:L | USA:R | Australia:M

Filming Locations:

Los Angeles, California, USA

A pale reflection of Scorsese's "After Hours"

This film doesn't work and you can blame the screenplay for it.

The premise is very appealing, but the subplots are not well integrated. The one involving a suitcase full of money, for example, is very confusing simply because its twists and turns hasn't any sense.

And it's no more believable the one concerning the woman who wants to get rid of her husband with the help of the protagonist. You just can't believe in the fascination the protagonist feels about her since she's not the kind of femme fatale she would have had to be. She's just plain vulgar and hysterical.

But the worst sin of all is the depiction of the protagonist. It's a pity the key character is so bad written: he is simply not coherent with his objectives. The characters have to behave and act in order to achieve a determinate goal. That seems obvious, but the protagonist of this film takes incoherent decisions and, in addition, at times he seems very polite, well-mannered and incapable of misbehave... and in the next sequence we see him running away with another person's suitcase full of money and planning to kill a man! No coherence here.

This reminded me a lot of Martin Scorsese's "After hours" (a character trying to escape from one disastrous situation only to collide with a worse one), but even the central character there was just passive and things just happened to him, he always tried to escape and he was coherent all along the way. That just doesn't happen with the central character of "Nervous Ticks". And unfortunately, it hasn't either the frantic mood of "After hours" because the plot gets stuck in the middle.

I'm sorry. It was a nice try, but...