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...
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...