After Dark My Sweet

Based on Jim Thompson's gritty 1955 novel, this thriller from director/screenwriter James Foley (Reckless, Who's That Girl?, At Close Range) displays Foley's characteristic visual flair along with--excepting At Close Range--his poor story sense. Jason Patric stars as Kevin "Kid" Collins, an ex-boxer who was sent to a mental hospital after pummeling a competitor to death. As the film opens, Collins has escaped, and is shuffling down the road, clutching a brown sack containing his few possessions. He meets Fay (Rachel Ward) in a tavern, and she takes him home, and offers him spare work around the grounds. He also meets Uncle Bud (Bruce Dern), an ex-cop turned full-time con man, who eventually proposes a plan to Collins: kidnap a local rich kid, and the ransom money gets split. Sounds simple, but it takes quite some time to figure out what's going on here. For roughly the first half of the film, Collins and Fay carry on eerie dialogue that sounds as if they're reading scripts from two unrelated films. About the time (way too late) that the film begins to make some sense, all we've learned is that these three weirdoes have something to do with each other, and we no longer much care what it is. After Dark My Sweet takes some interesting turns during its final lap--with all of the principals discovering more about their so-called cohorts (although some of these revelations only raise further unanswered questions). Most people won't stick with a film that's so frustratingly oddball, even with Patric's fine performance as a seedy but polite basket case. Not a necessary purchase. (R. Pitman)