Plenty of cops and corruption, but excitement’s in short supply
Sleepless
Dir: Baran bo Odar Cast: Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney, Scoot McNairy, Gabrielle Union, David Harbour, Octavius J Johnson
Sleepless is set not in Seattle but Vegas, and almost wholly in a single Strip casino-hotel, the fictional Luxus. There’s a reason it’s fictional. Few establishments would want themselves associated with the high-end cocaine deal going down here. Or the kidnapping. Or the bloody punch-ups in swimming pools.
As a would-be propulsive thriller – Die Hard goes to Sin City – the set-up is intriguing, because it has two main characters with each other’s worst interests at heart. One is a corrupt cop, Vincent Downs (Jamie Foxx), the other an Internal Affairs agent called Jen Bryant (Michelle Monaghan) looking for any opportunity to lock him up. Our sympathy for Downs might be limited, except that his son has just been taken hostage by the casino’s owner (Dermot Mulroney), who has no intention of staying quiet when 25kg of coke is snaffled by Downs and his partner in a street raid.
It would be easiest for Downs just to drop the drugs back off, grab his son, and run for the hills. But Bryant manages to find where he’s stashed them, charges off with the evidence, and makes everyone’s blood pressure soar for the rest of a long night.
Up to about here, the movie ticks along OK, in a crudely business-like sort of way. The problem is a lazy sense of development. Foxx’s son (Octavius J Johnson) has to be reabducted to keep everyone casinobound. And the fight scenes get crashingly repetitive and uninspired.
Poor Gabrielle Union is stuck with the thankless part of Downs’s ex-wife. The likeable Monaghan tries to broaden her range as a no-bullshit investigator, but the script is not her friend, or ours.
The film’s downward trajectory is steep and straight to late-night-onChannel-5 negligibility. There are only so many ways Foxx can hobble around with a stab wound and pick up multiple cellphones: after a while, it’s like watching fatigued takes of the same scene over and over again. If films could demonstrate RSI, Sleepless does. Caffeine not included.