After injuring his opponent in a match, Kevin "Kid" Collins quit his boxing profession and is now a nomad traveling through California. After a fight in a bar, a widowed woman, Fay, invites him to her car and drives him to her home, where she offers a trailer for Collins to stay. He is attracted to her, but doesn't want to commit, and thus just leaves one day. He is taken in by Dr. Goldman, who realizes the Collins has a medical condition. Collins just leaves once again, and returns to Fay. She is under the influence of Uncle Bud, who persuades Collins to kidnap a boy of a rich couple. Disguised as a chauffeur with sunglasses, Collins picks up the boy from a daycare park. The boy has diabetes, so Collins has to steal Dr. Goldman's insulin, whereas he suspects Bud wanted to shoot him and feign he saved the boy to collect the money from the rich couple. Bud goes to the airport to collect the ransom money, but is shot by an associate, and then the police storm the area. Fleeing in the car with Fay and the boy, Collins stops and decides to save Fay from the police: he pretends he is crazy and that the wants to kill the boy, so Fay takes the gun and shoots Collins.
Included in Roger Ebert's Great Movies list, "After Dark, My Sweet" is an excellent 90s film noir, albeit peculiarly unappealing to the mass audiences due to its unspectacular, unassuming style. It is kind of like the cinematic equivalent to broccoli: healthy for you, but the audience simply doesn't like it. The director James Foley refuses to place the emphasis on the crime elements, and instead focuses on the psycholigical aspect of the protagonist Kevin "Kid" Collins (a good Jason Patric), a man who always runs away from any kind of responsibility or connection, until he changes in the finale ("It was why I had been made like I was: to do something for her that she could not do for herself, and then to protect her so that she could go on, so that she could have the reason for living that I'd never had"). The characters of Collins and Fay have chemistry, and align towards the film noir rule—a lonely man finds a woman who is seemingly attracted to him, until he realizes she just wants to use him for a criminal plan; moody dialogues; tragic ending. The cinematography is remarkably crystal clear, almost as in a Hollywood film, not an independent movie. However, the movie does feel somewhat conventional and standard at times, with numerous moments that are well made, but unmemorable, and thus this comes off as a potential flaw. The stakes are raised and the suspense levels rush up during the kidnapping sequence, which is itself unusual—Collins, disguised as a chauffeur, deliberately picks up the wrong kid from a daycare park, because he suspects that his boss, Uncle Bud, wanted to shoot him and collect the money from the boy's rich family as a "hero". When he goes back to get the real boy, the kid doesn't protest, but just passively allowes to be taken away in the car by Collins. It's as if the boy is himself a symbol for "Kid" Collins, a passive person who drifts through destiny, until it is time to take control. Despite a rather lukewarm, unsatisfactory and too quick ending, "After Dark, My Sweet" succeeds as an aesthetic distillation of film noir into the modern world.
Grdae:+++
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