Film review: ‘SLEEPING DOGS’ by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’
Sleeping Dogs, which stars Russell Crowe, Karen Gillan and Martin Csokas, attempts to update the 1940’s film noir crime thriller to the present day. This is a tricky undertaking as that brooding style of film making was a very subtle art. While first-time director Adam Cooper manages – at least for a while – to build satisfying layers of mystery, Sleeping Dogs unfortunately goes wrong in a few departments leading to some unconvincing and even unintentionally comical moments.
Crowe plays former detective Roy Freeman who, after a traumatic incident, is suffering chronic amnesia. Like Guy Pearce’s character in Memento, he requires messages taped all over his home to remind him of who he is, the medication he needs to take etc. When a not-for-profit lawyer approaches him to help with one of his old cases involving the murder of a philandering professor (Martin Csokas) for which a young man (Pacharo Mzembe) is facing a death sentence, Roy battles his foggy past to unearth what seems to be a sinister conspiracy.
The combination of murder mystery and personal search for identity could have made for a riveting psychological drama and is the sort of thing Billy Wilder or Martin Scorsese would have nailed. With Sleeping Dogs, however, Adam Cooper, just manages to keep up the façade of credible drama before the cracks in the story become too wide.
Along the way, audiences will be slightly perplexed at the nature of Roy’s condition as his memory loss – even accounting for his medical treatment – is inconsistent. He struggles to function one moment then seems remarkably lucid, with a clear memory of facts about cases, the next. Just to remind us of Roy’s struggle with reality and his attempt to piece his life back together, though, the film employs clunky images like a scattered jigsaw puzzle in Roy’s apartment. Worse, though, the film occasionally veers into laugh out loud territory. In one sequence we go from a mad sadomasochistic humping session between one of the professor’s former lovers, Laura (Karen Gillan) and her boyfriend Richard (Harry Greenwood, son of Hugo Weaving) straight into an idyllic romantic montage backed by lilting acoustic guitar.
The noir thrillers of old made exquisite use of their black and white chiaroscuro palette but Sleeping Dogs isn’t very interesting visually. Filmed here in Victoria but set in the US, this movie gives us little sense of the local environment with much of it taking place in very generic looking offices or shabby apartments. The film also relies too much on close-ups and has suspiciously few background extras suggesting budget restrictions.
This film’s clumsy missteps and clichés just about derail it but a few aspects keep us interested, particularly the performance from Russell Crowe. The character of Roy Freeman is the sort of role Crowe eats up and his brooding depiction of the ailing cop is engrossing. Karen Gillan (who made Nebula an iconic figure in the Marvel films), however, gives a weirdly awkward performance as resident femme fatale Laura. Her dialogue delivery is stiff and she has a strange, icy Stepford wife demeanour broken only by occasionally pained facial expressions. Martin Csokas has the right amount of creepy charisma as the Professor but isn’t given quite enough screen time to make the role memorable. As Crowe’s former detective partner Jimmy, Tommy Flanagan (who has an impressive resumé that includes Braveheart and Gladiator) – chomps the scenery a bit too vigorously. As the Professor’s grumpy maintenance man, Thomas M. Wright’s character looks so suspicious he could be a Scooby Doo villain. Harry Greenwood, however, brings some intensity to the role of Laura’s cuckolded boyfriend Richard.
Some will be put off by this film’s sillier aspects while others will appreciate that it least took a swing at the noir thriller genre. It’s hard to deny, though, that the opportunity for a much better film has been missed.
Nick’s rating: **1/2
Genre: Drama/ Thriller/Crime
Classification: MA15+.
Director(s): Adam Cooper.
Release date: 1st Aug 2024.
Running time: 112 mins.
Reviewer: Nick Gardener can be heard on “Built For Speed” every Friday night from 8-10pm on 88.3 Southern FM.