Sleeping Dogs (2024)

Sleeping-Dogs-(2024)
Sleeping Dogs (2024)

Sleeping Dogs

The Russell Crowe comeback feels imminent. I have been saying that since “The Nice Guys,” so I could be wrong. But there is no denying that he’s reached a point in his career where he has nothing left to prove, and often is the best thing about whatever project he’s in. (He made “The Pope’s Exorcist” a million times better than it would have been with anyone else in that part, and I kind of hope they make five more.) It really just takes the right filmmaker believing in him.

So I was intrigued by Adam Cooper’s “Sleeping Dogs,” which looked like it could be Crowe’s “Memento,” a twisty noir that screws around with memory and perception and an unreliable narrator or three. And while Crowe brings more to this sleepy movie than it deserves, now I’m scared the Oscar winner might end up going the other direction getting sucked into the world of cheapie VOD thrillers that have filled the resumes of actors who used to be pickier (sorry, Travolta fans). He’s better than this one. Most actors are.

Based on The Book of Mirrors by E.O. Chirovici, “Sleeping Dogs” begins with its protagonist deep within the waking nightmare of dementia. Retired cop Roy Freeman (Crowe) has taped notes all over his house reminding him not only how to make toast but who he is. Of course this will become one of those movies with an illness at its convenience a particularly offensive brand of disease exploitation if you ask me where it either disappears when convenient for plot momentum or holds our hero back when necessary for narrative tension or whatevs. So Roy also is undergoing some radical treatments involving brain surgery and constant medication because why not? This way we get the classic cop character investigating a crime he already closed as if for first time beat. Y’all know he gonna rediscover some things he forgot for a reason.

The re-investigation is launched by the imminent execution of death row inmate Isaac Samuel (Pacharo Mzembe), convicted of the bloody murder of professor/researcher Dr. Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas) a decade earlier this very night! Samuel’s obviously innocent no movie otherwise, right? and flashbacks show him to be present when Wieder was murdered but didn’t actually see the doctor’s assailant. So Roy starts poking around again, which puts him back on the old beat with his former partner Jimmy Remis (Tommy Flanagan, trying even harder than Crowe to out-grizzle everyone in sight), who keeps telling Roy it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. Get it? That’s the title!

Roy, despite his devastating illness, decides yes, to re examine it again and then all the way back through time. He starts with Richard Finn (Harry Greenwood) who has just recently died suspiciously so but only after writing a kind of true-crime memoir about the Wieder murder. Laura Baines (Karen Gillan) was Finn’s partner and also research partners maybe more than that? with Wieder, and she is clearly one of the keys to what happened that night.

Cooper’s film fractures into a long flashback to the weeks leading up to the crime through Finn’s eyes/voice, but we’re never quite sure how seriously we’re supposed to take any of this. It is not simply that writing that describes Laura as “one of those rare unicorns who knew everything about everything” cannot possibly be taken seriously nor even that we are given reason to suspect there might be something wrong with Finn playing with the artistic license of his form or not having all the facts himself. We are being unpacked here by a case through a dead man’s writing as interpreted by a memory depleted cop in a language I cannot read.

A script by Cooper and Bill Collage in which a case is unpacked through a dead man’s writing as interpreted by a memory depleted cop could make for interesting fiction on the page, yes, but good luck trying to parse it in film language. Roy interprets things differently almost every time he looks at them, he does not know what is real or when he lives. The narrative consistently dips into incoherent plotting and inconsistent characters like it can’t help itself because there isn’t one single reliable narrator among its ranks: understandable, even inevitable!, but also bound to lead us into some scenes that play like utter nonsense and too much else besides that hits like hammer on nail. For instance: Roy puts together puzzles because they keep his mind sharp while he is up on his stilts, but also because he is literally putting the puzzle of his memory and the case together. He then talks about doing puzzles in voiceover just in case you didn’t get it.

In “Sleeping Dogs,” however, everyone looks lost or annoyed or both (except for Crowe, who grumbles his way through another film with deceptive ease, always finding occasions to ground even a miserable film like this one). My hope is that “Sleeping Dogs” wakes him up, and that he remembers the actor he can still be.

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