SLEEPLESS: Fast-Paced Cop Thriller Under-Achieves

At first glance, Sleepless could easily be a fungible entry near the bottom of Liam Neeson’s slush pile. Fortunately, this under-marketed action crime yarn is better than it looks, but not as good as it could be.

Jamie Foxx plays Vincent Downs, an ostensibly dirty Las Vegas cop who, with his partner (T.I.) has just stolen a shipment of cocaine worth millions. What they don’t know is that stylishly sleazy casino entrepreneur Stanley Rubino (Dermot Mulroney) was in the process of selling it to gangland scion Rob Novak (Scoot McNairy) neither one of which can afford to be seen as being unable to complete the deal. McNairy has just cut the tongue out of his own cousin to avoid his father’s wrath, and fear has a distinct trickle-down effect here. Before we know it, Foxx’s semi-estranged son Markell (Octavius J. Johnson) is kidnapped as collateral.

Complicating everything is Internal Affairs detective Jennifer Bryant (Michelle Monaghan). Dogged and determined with a chip on her shoulders, Bryant seems to be driven by a nearly Javert-like relentlessness, and also seems to have never seen a cop movie. The audience is far more likely to pick up on clichéd clues than she is – but Monaghan is a good actress and keeps a straight face throughout.

Jamie Foxx can’t breathe life into his hero

The audience, of course, is primed to root for Vincent whether he’s dirty or not, because for most of the movie he’s also and primarily a father determined to save his son. Jamie Foxx’s substantial gifts, including his not inconsiderable charm and comic timing, are not evident here, and that’s a pity. The terse, minimalistic screenplay juxtaposes viewpoints, which dilutes his presumptive status as point-of-view character and frequently reduces him to not much more than a two-dimensional cipher. Thinking man’s action auteur Walter Hill always knew how to pull this sort of thing off, but here the audience can be forgiven for losing sight of who the movie is actually about.

As his estranged wife, the lovely Gabrielle Union is completely wasted, reduced to a series of increasingly skeptical cell phone conversations, until she’s implausibly shoehorned into the climax. The character had the potential to at least function as a sarcastic Greek chorus, think Bonnie Bedelia in Die Hard, but isn’t even given that much opportunity.

Remake of Nuit blanche

The audience is soon in on the fact that, whether Vincent’s clean or dirty, there’s someone running around feeding intel to McNairy’s crime family. This type of stuff is oddly more common in foreign cop movies, like the Hong Kong entry Infernal Affairs remade and overstuffed into Scorsese’s The Departed, or any number of Luc Besson productions. As it happens, Sleepless is a remake of the French/Belgian Nuit Blanche, but despite being helmed by a Swiss director, Baran bo Odar, ends up with a paint-by-numbers Hollywood mentality that undermines every attempt to make a darker movie.

Sleepless is a taut, lean exercise that takes place almost entirely in one night and Odar, working from a script by Andrea Berloff (Oscar-nominated for Straight Outta Compton), keeps the momentum cranking at a relentless pace – an absolute necessity to keep the audience from noting the lapses in plausibility that perforate the movie even more incessantly than the special effects squib bullet holes.

Posing as a hotel worker in an elevator, Vincent keeps his head down so that Bryant won’t spot him and then, just as the elevator doors are closing, inexplicably looks up and gets recognized for no reason other than it makes a cool moment onscreen. The ostensibly by-the-books Bryant disregards procedure with evidence because they “don’t have time” for niceties like warrants – and she works for IA…? A casino employee has a line of cops demanding access to a spa locker but never seems to think her bosses might want to know about all this police activity on the premises? This is the boneheaded alternate universe Sleepless takes place in.

We should be grateful for the clichés avoided

Still, we should spare a little gratitude for the clichés avoided, particularly tattooed Russian gangsters competing with Yakuza for most inked gangster. Surely a country of America’s resources can provide its own gangsters without outsourcing. Also missing but unmissed are The Cranky Lieutenant, The Beautiful Material Witness Who Sleeps With the Hero, The Hooker With the Heart of Gold (often also The Beautiful Material Witness) and The Ethnic Minority Comic Relief. Some Brownie points should be awarded for frequent shots of the Vegas skyline at night unaccompanied by Elvis’ “A Little Less Conversation.”

The bad guys fare much better. Mulroney’s stressed-out casino owner, who really doesn’t seem to need to be in the drug business, is interesting to watch, as his ostensibly iron control begins to crumble in the face of McNairy’s much tougher enforcer. It is McNairy, though, who completely steals the show, providing a blessed breath of fresh air from the run of mentally defective ganglord sons that have been populating this type of modern crime thriller. He’s tough, smart, and ruthless, but also feeling the stress from trying to satisfy his father who runs the family business.

Competent but not dazzling production

Technically, Sleepless is a competently but not dazzlingly executed production. The night photography by Mihai Malaimare, Jr. is appropriately moody. The frequent glittering, neon bright shots of the Vegas skyline at night, interspersed at uniform and even unnecessary intervals throughout the movie, do give rise to a suspicion that the production, which received Georgia tax credits, was largely shot elsewhere.

Veteran martial arts choreographer Jeff Imada staged the movie’s frequent Bourne-influenced fight scenes, and as Imada is credited as a second unit director, it’s a safe bet he directed them as well, making it all the more ironic that the movie suffers from the all-too frequent mistake of putting the camera too close. The movie is rated R for language and violence, although the action is far less graphic than the average episode of The Walking Dead .

Conclusion

Sleepless doesn’t set a particularly high bar for itself, but it achieves its own modest goals competently, if unimaginatively. The door is left open for a sequel, but it’s unlikely that audience interest will justify one. In this day and age, franchises seldom arise from a gentleman’s “C” mentality. In a competitive marketplace, Sleepless is likely to get a “Wait for Redbox” in the comments section.

What do you think? Does Sleepless suffer from a lack of ambition or a lack of execution?

https://youtu.be/grqVFoJ3jJg