Delayed Reaction: After Hours

Premise: A yuppie goes through a series of misadventures over one long New York night.

 

Odyssey movies are some of the easiest movies to get right. The formula is so simple. Give a character a mission. Create a path with as many nonsensical side missions as you want. Create a bunch of fun characters. And make whatever random connections to all the characters and stories that you want. I complain a lot about contrivance in movies. That thing where a writer gets lazy and forces a connection that isn't plausible, just because it manufactures story easier. That isn't really a concern in an Odyssey movie. Contrivance is part of the fun.

 

In a city as large are New York, Griffin Dunne runs into the same robbers multiple times. His $20 bill ends up on the paper mache statue in the apartment he goes to. The girl he came to this part of the city for is also dating the bartender he exchanges keys with. It's all ridiculous, but it works because that's the kind of movie this is.

 

This isn't the best Martin Scorsese movie out there. I think he makes movies on occasion just to prove that he can do it. Hugo is his family movie. Cape Fear is his scary movie. After Hours was his straightforward comedy (The King of Comedy is more dark than funny in my book). After Hours is mostly successful, although it never quite reached laugh out loud funny. The closest I really came to laughing was from the certainty I was about to laugh when I saw Catherine O’Hara.

 

While I like Griffin Dunne as a less likely Scorsese lead, I did feel a little deprived of star power in this. Scorsese is best when he has a couple Oscar nominees on board. I'm not sure this cast has any*. Like, Tom Hanks could've knocked this out of the park instead of Dunne. Perhaps getting Willem Dafoe for Tom the Bartender would've hit too serious a tone. This really felt like more of a side project of Scorsese; like some time opened up on his schedule and he thought it would be fun to try.

 

*I checked. Just one for Teri Garr unless you want count Dunne's for producing a Live-Action Short. I didn't find any others.

 

All that said, the movie was still very watchable and zipped right along. Scorsese has yet to make a movie I've seen that I thought was a miss.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend