THE JIST: See something else.

This film was highly rated by Gene Siskel, but after watching it I can't figure out why. The film is definitely original and different. It even has interesting dialogue at times, some cool moments, and a creepy "noir" feel. But it just isn't entertaining. It also doesn't make a whole lot of sense, in plot but especially in character motivations. I don't know anyone that behaves like these characters do.

This is a difficult movie to take on -- I suggest you don't accept the challenge.

In James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet, drawn from Jim Thompson's moody suspense novel, Jason Patric gives a late riff on early Brando. He plays `Kid' Collins, a `retired' boxer who spent some spells in mental institutions after killing an opponent in the ring; now he's frozen into a perpetual fighter's crouch.

Now on the road, he drifts into a bar frequented by Rachel Ward and her unexplained Cornish accent (still a juicer, she's not quite the slatternly shrew of the book). She takes him home and stashes him in a trailer out back among the date palms. Next, up pops `Uncle' Bud (Bruce Dern), who suborns Patric into a half-baked scheme for kidnapping a rich kid. As happens with such schemes, things go awry (the kid turns out to be a diabetic, for one thing), and it falls to Patric to put matters right by a supreme act of self-sacrifice.

But the somnolent pace and elliptical plotting that worked in Thompson's telling sit uncomfortably on the screen. Even in the 1950s, the novel felt that it belonged to the conventions of a decade (or two) earlier – it's a Depression-era, or immediate post-war kind of story. Fast-forwarding it to the 1990s proved more a shock than it could sustain, a disparity exaggerated by misguided fealty to the book.

While there's some fussy updating (the anonymous sticks of Thompson's vision become a faintly upscale desert enclave; an airport replaces the bus terminal), elements that need freshening stick out as anachronisms. For instance, the solicitous attraction felt by the 50-year-old bachelor doctor (George Dickerson) toward Patric can only be homoerotic. While Thompson, chafing under the constraints of his time, left that to be distantly inferred, there's no reason to be coy about it more than 30 years later (there's little coy about the lovemaking between Ward and Patric). To his credit, Dickerson gives the game away with his doomed looks of longing; was it Charles Laughton who remarked `They can't censor the gleam in my eye?' And the long fuse between Ward and Patric sputters on and on; the movie could only be improved by losing half an hour of downing drinks and exchanging alternating glances of hatred and lust.

The best thing about After Dark, My Sweet is Patric's performance, even if, in keeping with the fads of the 1950s, it gives off too many whiffs of `method.' At least he gives the role his best shot. The movie's flaws, however, can't be ascribed to Thompson. Latter-day filmings of his work, like The Grifters of the same year and (especially) The Kill-Off a year before, show there's plenty of punch left in the old pulpmeister.

'Noir' is a film style which is now long gone. There were some good noir films and there were a great many mediocre ones, but that era, and the monochrome (posh word for 'in black and white'). But they were very much of their time, what with the supercool narration, hip dialogue, amoral heroes and generally being downs. The good guys weren't good guys and if they died, well, what did they think they were supposed to do?

At their best they weren't action films but psychological, and although many did have a passable plot, the plot wasn't what you watched them for. You watched them for the double-dealing, the treachery. When the time came for all films to be made in colour (and these days if you want to make a 'monochrome' film, you have to shoot it in colour, then let the lab reduce it to black and white because no one manufactures black and white film stock any more) they seemed to have died a death, which is probably when the mediocre noir films were made.

But writers and directors being a certain breed, they were still attracted to 'noir' in which plot comes second to character and psychology. The rather fanciful term 'neo noir' was coined to somehow contain them, but I for one put the term down more as a pretentious phrase to drop into conversation when you are chatting up a female film buff than anything which means much these days.

After Dark, My Sweet – the title is utterly gratuitous, by the way, and relates to nothing in this film – is, at the very least, a genuine neo noir, despite my misgivings about the phrase. Don't watch it for the plot, watch it for the acting, the interaction between three losers – Jason Patric, always worth the price of admission, Bruce Dern (ditto) and Rachel Ward – and the utterly convoluted, at times quite hard to follow, storyline.

It has its flaws but will keep you watching if this is your bag. It is mine. It would be pointless to outline the plot, as so many do here in IMDb reviews, and all I shall say is that if you reckon this is your bag, you won't be disappointed. Fans of car chases, shoot-outs, violence, neat endings and 'story' would be well advised to look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you fancy an intriguing 'neo noir' give it a whirl. You won't be disappointed. And if you can make head or tail of it, award yourself a brownie point or two. But it ain't half bad, and then some.