Nervous Ticks (1992) User Reviews

Re: A pale reflection of Scorsese's "After Hours"

[DavidLouisLevine · 7/10 · 15 March 2009]

I disagree about the film not working.

It's true that York appears confused and at times aimless, but that's believable reaction to the chaos around him.

He's a staid and boring but polite and precise person who appears to have stepped out of that character to run away with another man's wife. His attraction to her? She's sexy, lustful, and rich.

He changes during the film after being forced to do things out of his normal character like shove a woman out of the elevator and run from criminals who are shooting at him.

After all the stress and after losing the KISS FM contest, of course he takes the ill-gotten money of a man who threatened him and endangered his life.

I do agree that I didn't see any motivation for him to briefly decide to go ahead with the insulin murder scheme but again, he's stressed to the breaking point.

York is a different character from the people in "After Hours". He's able to center himself each time after a crazy event and fairly calmly move to the next disaster.

I think the pacing was deliberate, such as the elevator scene, which drags somewhat but had me squirming while thinking "he's only got five minutes!" BTW - Notice that the only bag he's ever lost is the one with the bomb in it that would have destroyed the plane and instead killed his thug co-worker.

Apart from being funny it shows important things.

[sanya · 5 February 1999]

This is a really great comedy. And apart from being funny it shows something really important to me: a person which is always polite.The task to teach all people to love each other proved to be too difficult to be done in 2 millenniums. So, what we should try to do is be always polite, which is somewhere between what we are and what we must be. Bill Pullman's character's professional unbelievable politeness is a very good example.

It'll do if you're bored enough

[utgard14 · 4/10 · 24 October 2020]

Wimpy guy has a night where he gets into one wacky situation after another. Been done before and better in movies like After Hours and Into the Night. Bill Pullman isn't really the type of actor for this kind of part but to be fair to him the writing isn't great. None of the situations they put this guy in are funny or memorable. On the positive side it moves along at a nice pace from one bit to the next so it's watchable enough. Also Zoe Trilling has a brief but amazing topless scene.

A pale reflection of Scorsese's "After Hours"

[jrgirones · 2/10 · 5 January 2003]

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...

Goofy But Funny

[fixituplady · 8/10 · 16 October 2017]

Nervous Ticks has got to be one of my favorite movies just because it is so full of twists and turns in this poor guy's life. I don't think there is anyone who can say that they've never had a day where everything seemed to go wrong. It's just funny to see it all unfold into one very long day.