New York. Paul is bored with his office job in a huge building. One evening at a cafe, while reading Henry Miller's novel, he is approached by a girl, Marcy, who gives him her number, under the pretext that her friend, sculptor Kiki, is selling plaster paperweight. Later on, Paul calls her number and arrives at her apartment, but only finds Kiki there. When Marcy arrives, she acts strange and mentions her husband, prompting Paul to leave. However, since he lost his money, Paul falls into numerous misadventures that night, and is chased by a mob who mistakes him for a burglar. He hides in a basement, where an artist puts plaster around him to disguise him as a sculpture. He is stolen by two sculpture burglars, but falls out of their van on the street, right next to his job building. The cast breaks and he just walks into his office.
Numerous filmmakers figure out which genre "suits" them the best and then stick with it for the majority of their careers, and there is a reason the director Martin Scorsese avoided comedy after this film. It is a fascinating departure from the director known for gangster and crime dramas, yet, just like his previous film, "The King of Comedy", Scorsese demonstrated that he doesn't have a sense for comic timing, making the entire film seem "off". Griffin Dunne is excellent as the annoyed Paul who gets into numerous misadventures when he falls into some sort of 'Murphy's law' period after midnight —whatever step he does, everything goes wrong, and in one scene, after witnessing a random murder through the window, cynically says to himself: "I'll probably get blamed for that!"—but "After Hours" is assembled almost deliberately, it seems, as an experimental film without a goal, without a three act structure, without a character arc, where characters appear and disappear as swiftly as a merry-go-round (the second billed actress, Rosanna Arquette, for instance, plays a character who commits suicide already a third (!) into the film, whereas Teri Garr is given only five minutes of screen time as the waitress before being "removed" from the picture), leaving the film feeling ultimately too episodic, disjointed and without a meaning. The only interesting theme is the ending which makes a full circle, arguing about the futile attempt of people to do anything to get away from their grey routine, only to in the end just get back to the said routine. "After Hours" is an interesting exercise for the director, but still proved to be part of his meandering phase in the 80s until he would recover with the excellent "The Last Temptation of Christ".
Grade:++
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