Nervous Ticks

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.

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.

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.

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...