I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
The title of "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is nicked from an old Warren Zevon song, but the movie is a British gloss on the poker-faced existential crime films made by Jean-Pierre Melville back in the day -- four-star classics like "Bob le Flambeur" (1955), "Le Samourai" (1963), and "Le Cercle Rouge" (1970).
Unfortunately, something has been lost in the translation. "Sleep" feels undernourished in plot, characterization, and dialogue, and what should play with minimalist high tension is allowed to sag lower and lower until it simply grounds out. The result is a revenge thriller that's too taken with its own ambience to actually thrill.
Director Mike Hodges and star Clive Owen made their bones with 1998's "Croupier," a sleek and twisty British noir that established the actor as a brooding, brainy matinee idol and reestablished the filmmaker as more than just a one-hit wonder (1970's "Get Carter"). They've come croppers this time, though. When first we see Owen's Will Graham he's bearded and working as a logger in the north of England, and the actor's terse magnetism is effectively muffled by all that facial hair.
Meanwhile, in London, a chipper young tough named Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, of "Bend It Like Beckham") is stalked through his Saturday night drug-dealings by a limo containing a mysterious Mr. Big, who's played by Malcolm McDowell with a weary echo of Droogs past. What happens to Davey is not pretty, and it eventually brings Will out of the hinterlands seeking vengeance.
Will is Davey's big brother, it turns out, and not only that but a killer who was once the hardest spiv on the block. Grown men grow pale and eye the exits when they hear Will Graham's back in town -- that sort of thing. In theory, the suspense driving the film is whether he will give in to his animal urges and strike back or listen to the pleadings of glumly chic restaurateur Helen (Charlotte Rampling).
In the playing, there's no suspense at all, and not just because you're too busy trying to figure out whether Helen is Will's mother or his ex-girlfriend. Owen's character is the latest in a long line of zen-noir warriors -- he could be the little brother of Alain Delon's expressionless hitman in "Le Samourai" -- but once you've figured out who's who, for the most part, it's clear where "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is going and also that there's not nearly enough verve in the getting there.
The other characters are temporary diversions: Will and Davey's excitable pal -- or is he another brother? -- Mickser (Jamie Foreman), a coolly corporate crime boss (Ken Stott), a model (Amber Batty) with brains but no common sense. Late in the game, a runty Irish assassin named Paulin (Marc O'Shea) is imported to deal with Will, and he's such an intriguing character that you look forward to the showdown. "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" takes pleasure in quashing such expectations.
By the end, the film's artful hollowness has become annoying, as has Simon Fisher Turner's score, an initially novel work of musique concrete thumps and scrapes. Owen and Stott also appear in the current studio behemoth "King Arthur," the former as Arthur and the latter as a nasty Roman, and it says a lot that both actors are more vividly present in that film than in the supposedly leaner, smarter "Sleep." Revenge might be a dish best served cold -- but not this cold.
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