Movie Review ~ Sleeping Dogs

Newly minted Best Director Oscar winner Christoper Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a towering achievement, a centralized jewel in a cinematic crown encompassing numerous blockbusters and landmark films that have changed how we view going to the movies. With each new film, though, and with every title he has that shot to the top of the IMDb top 250, I can’t help but be a little sad that his first breakthrough falls further through the cracks. While it doesn’t have the benefit of flashy special effects or a superhero cowl to give it franchise potential, 2000’s Memento is a mind-bending mystery that set memory-centric narratives on its ear and ushered in a new breed of psychological thriller. It holds up terrifically well, and I hope it always gets brought up when discussing Nolan’s most influential work.

It obviously is still influencing filmmakers because Sleeping Dogs, a new thriller made in Australia by first-time feature director Adam Cooper, follows a similar unraveling thread. This adaptation of E.O. Chirovici’s 2017 novel The Book of Mirrors attempts to fold time and memory into its labyrinthine plot but lacks the sharp turns of Memento and meanders in its mystery more than it mystifies us with its twists. Sluggishly paced and far too somber to keep its audience engaged enough to care about the solution, the whodunit quickly becomes a whenisthisover?

Retired homicide detective Roy Freeman (Russell Crowe, Unhinged) is recovering from an experimental surgery that will stop the progression of the Alzheimer’s that has ravaged his once astute mind. He has taped notes around his home that remind him of who he is (down to his social security number) and instructions on doing even the most basic tasks. (I did chuckle when he grabbed a frozen meal with a hand-written note that said, “Open box, take meal out, put in microwave for 3:00 minutes”…you know, what’s on the back of the box already.) Bearded and bald but with two crude scars on top of his head, he wears a knit cap to conceal the laced netting he’s required to wear over his dome while healing.

A call from a representative at an Innocence Project-type organization urges Freeman to meet with death row prisoner Isaac Samuel (Pacharo Mzembe), whom he helped put away from the murder of a college professor (Marton Csokas, The Last Duel) nine years earlier. Samuel maintains his innocence, and since Freeman can’t remember the crime or the people involved and seeing that the prisoner’s days are numbered, he decides to poke around the details to see if anything was missed. He has barely touched base with his former partner Jimmy Remis (Tommy Flanagan, Papillon) before a new body related to the original case turns up, forcing Freeman to confront ghosts of his personal and professional life.

I suppose hidden somewhere in the overly serpentine plot of Sleeping Dogs lies an exciting thriller with characters possessing emotional depth, but you won’t find it on screen. The film takes forever to get going, frequently flashing back to the original crime with characters we may have just met and then asking us to keep track of their involvement in the present, though we may only hear them mentioned by name.  If it’s meant to perplex us like Freeman, it works, but it doesn’t make much sense to alienate your viewer on purpose and not back it up with some payoff at the end.

More than that, the movie will deliberately muddy details to delay the discovery of the truth for no reason other than the screenplay demands it to be so. That’s why a particular piece of evidence, I won’t say what, is damaged but could easily be salvaged to give Freeman a critical clue. Instead of fixing it, he waits forty-five minutes to take the three seconds to restore the item and make a connection that changes the direction in which he’s looking for the culprit.

Oscar-winner Crowe’s venture into these peculiar, low-budget Australian productions (like February’s Land of Bad) is a baffling choice, and his performance as the tormented Freeman fails to elevate the material. He’s treading into the waters of Mel Gibson, John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, and John Malkovich, once A-list actors who seemingly take any script that offers the most convenient shooting schedule and location. While Crowe is the most solid of the international cast (many of whom are desperately trying to hide their accents), the material is so uninspired that I can hardly blame the actors for phoning it in. Karen Gillan (Oculus) calls long-distance, delivering her lines with the inflection of a dial tone.

It’s disappointing that Cooper (who co-wrote the script with Bill Collage) can’t make this material more actively entertaining. He’s written the screenplay for a wide array of films over the years, from Assassin’s Creed and Allegiant in 2016, Exodus: Gods and Kings in 2014, the college comedy Accepted in 2006, and 2004’s New York Minute, starring Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Uneven character development does his actors no favor, and assembling Ben Nott’s (Jigsaw) visually competent, if languid, cinematography can’t fix what the script doesn’t offer: energy.

Had it not been so content to lie in the realm of the forgettable, Sleeping Dogs may have had more bite. Attempts to tackle lasting consequences for our actions coupled with the theme of memory and truth should be able to captivate. Still, this unremarkable whodunit’s lack of focus ultimately is its worst enemy. While it may find its audience based on Crowe (and Gillan) fans, don’t expect this to leave any lasting impression.