I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

source: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

After the suicide of the small time drug dealer and thief Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), his brother and former powerful gangster Will Graham (Clive Owen), who is living a peaceful recluse life trying to redeem himself from his past, returns to his homeland to investigate the motives for such desperate act. Will hires an independent autopsy and the coroner informs that Davey had been raped the night before his death. Will returns to his past life seeking for revenge. "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is a deceptive thriller with an absolute absence of originality. In spite of having a great cast leaded by Clive Owen, Charlotte Rampling, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Malcolm McDowell, and a beautiful and stylish cinematography, the screenplay is very weak and confused, with a storyline similar to many other better movies. The characters are badly developed, and who they are and their motives are disclosed in a confused way. Further, the motives of Boad for the stupidity against Davey are unbelievably ridiculous. My vote is six. Title (Brazil):" Vingança Final" ("Final Revenge")

This story starts with several sets of mostly low life characters in various settings and slowly shows how the characters relate. Davey(Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is the self absorbed party animal, low level drug dealer whose tragic events form the glue to tie the characters together. Will (Clive Owen) first appears as a hard working back to nature recluse, but we soon learn he is Davey's brother. We learn that this morose woodsman was some kind of crime boss. His return to deal with Davey's tragedy kicks off the pivotal events that make up the rest of the movie. What looks at first like several disjointed stories slowly starts tying together. This is not your glorified crime life like the Godfather, or the Sopranos. This story is not about action, it's about how criminals think and feel and act based on those thoughts and feelings. It is a dark world, full of bad choices and painful consequences. It is a somewhat complicated story like these kinds of things are in real life. There are old relationships: loves, friends, enemies that must be dealt with in a time when emotion is hard to control. If you want something fast, are looking for clear cut plots, and easily understood characters you will be disappointed. I personally like movies sometimes that are not afraid to break with clear cut formulas and don't feel compelled to explain everything in clear terms. I found the movie very intriguing. This is a movie about how characters, in this case, criminals, process tragic events. These dark characters living in this dark world had to deal with something that was especially dark to them. The story moves slowly because it is not about action, but the dark setting, the subtle effects on the characters as the story progresses and so on. In reality tragic events are often not clear cut, and the movie is real in its development of the story. I found myself feeling for the characters, albeit mostly sadness and a little pity with a little admiration, compassion, and understanding thrown in. If you enjoy film noir I think you might like this film.

Clive Owen was great in his role, however, he was not enough to carry this painfully dull picture. What masqueraded as taut and gripping came across poorly and wound up being a very slow paced movie. There are many great movies built around conversations ("Reservoir Dogs") and the stories that the conversation revolve around; this movie has neither great conversations or a great story to build upon. None of the audience I was in even seemed to be caught up in the movie (I even heard someone snoring behind me). The scene that caught the most gasps and comments was when he uncovered his Jaguar. That should tell you something about the rest of this boring, overly talkative movie.

Will Graham (Clive Owen)is a former gangster boss who gave it all up out of disgust at wasting his life in crime, he now lives out of the back of a van and fleets from one anonymous job to the next, sometimes not speaking to another person for weeks on end. After losing his latest job as a forestry worker, he decides to ring his younger brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) whom he left in London three years previous, but when he is unable to contact him, he heads for home. On arrival he finds that Davey has committed suicide, but Will is unconvinced and orders a separate independent autopsy, which reveals the shocking truth behind his death. After his success with Croupier, Hodges again returned to the crime genre, and again called on Owen as well as a host of familiar faces, not least Charlotte Rampling as the former love interest of Owen and Malcolm Mc Dowell as a car salesman with a penchant for rape. In a film that is light on dialogue, a strong acting style is required and Owen delivers in spades in a very downbeat role. Hodges even with a meagre budget manages to instill a fine sense of Noir and he manages to keep a tight grip on his actors who never resort to the histrionics that have marred other contemporary Brit Crime films. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead on the face of it has a lot in common with its directors debut, Get Carter, in that they both have their hero going home to find out what happened to their brother and the resulting revenge plot line, but they are quite different films, if anything this latest offering is even darker. Will Graham is a troubled man, coming to terms with his demons, he doesn't want to return to his former violent lifestyle, a lifestyle it must be said that is never alluded to, but the viewer is left in no doubt as fear of him is quite apparent from the faces and demeanour of other criminals who knew him. Some would argue the films ambiguous ending is a let down, I see it as a triumph, its rare to find films this brave, Hodges despite his checkered past is back on top form.

I could never figure out the relationships between the characters. That seemed to be where the real film lay, but instead the decision was made to make a film about an incident that happened after the real story had taken place. In fact, there seemed to be lots of interesting stories alluded to, but the one we were presented with was the most ghoulish and the least satisfactory. Who was the guy getting beaten up in the woods? He had a needy wife, had been in prison... there was a story there. Maybe that was the better story. Then, there is the scene where Davey takes the cab home, and meets the hippie cab driver. Davey chides him about the orange cab, the cab breaks down, and the driver decides to move to New York. We watch both men walk away from the cab, and I was disappointed to have to follow Davey. I wanted to go to NY with the driver. I kept waiting for Clive Owen and Charlotte Rampling to have something to do, something to react about, something reason to raise their voices above a monotone, some reason to show who they were. Never came.

Mike Hodges new film boasts an excellent cast. Unfortunately the actors, like the whole film, look better in theory than in practice. To say that this film doesn't deliver would be kind. In fact, it rarely threatens to even engage the viewer. The dialogue is perfunctory and poorly delivered, characters seem to pop into the movie in order to develop the background to the leads, and then disappear after one, disappointing line. The character development is clumsy at best, for example in the scene where we find out that Will is a merciful man, because he has helped someone who has been beaten up for no discernible reason. Hodges has tried to make another Get Carter, and failed in every regard. If you want revenge, watch Kill Bill 2 again.

*some spoilers follow* I dutifully hoofed it to Manhattan to see "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" because I'm a big fan of director Mike Hodges' previous work, including the classic "Get Carter," the rather good "Croupier," and the sporadically amusing "Flash Gordon." I had read some lukewarm-to-bad reviews of this, his latest effort, so I was prepared to be a bit disappointed. What I wasn't prepared for was a virtual remake of "Get Carter." Both films involve a tough criminal (okay, Owen is an ex-criminal here) who returns home after a long absence to investigate the death of his brother. In both films, this vengeful character quickly irks the local crooks, who have a vested interest in keeping the brother's death hush-hush. Trouble is, "Get Carter" is a better film in virtually every respect. There's nothing particularly wrong with "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" (except maybe that meaningless title), but it just can't live up to its predecessor. There's plenty of mood here, and great characterization, and solid acting, but it simply doesn't rate as a classic. And so, for a Hodges fan, it's disappointing. Strange, eh? I'll bet that people who come to this film cold, with no expectations, will like it better. I want to argue against one common criticism of this film, however. Some critics have branded it "slow," but generally speaking, I find that this label is inaccurately applied and often meaningless. The film is not "slow," it's atmospheric and methodical. I wasn't bored. Of course the pacing could've been faster, and if a lesser director was behind the camera, maybe I would've been bored. But I was pretty invested in the story, so my attention was held. When critics or casual viewers say that something is "slow," they generally mean that they weren't interested in the story, not that the pacing was off. These days, a slow pace is actually a welcome relief from the music video antics of a hyperactive film like "Van Helsing." "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" commits only a couple of major sins that really have nothing to do with pacing. The character of Owen's brother is simply too skeevy and obnoxious to garner much sympathy from the audience. Too many key scenes are left out (I wanted to see Owen's reaction when he was told about his brother's death). And the open ending needs to be filed under "nice try, but doesn't work." These flaws do detract from the film, but they don't cripple it. Oh, and it's not quite as good as "Get Carter." But it ain't slow.

This is a great movie laden with enigmatic style. A modern, gritty film noir with a powerful and restrained performance by Clive Owen. Compared to other contemporary gangster movies, this one does without cheap action and unmotivated aspects of humor. This is a film taking itself and its moviegoers seriously. The pace and rhythm of the movie and great cinematography accentuates the underlying and half hidden aspects of the script, Clive Owen's acting really proves here that less is more. This movie is indeed one of the two best crime movies to come out of Britain around the turn of the millennium, the other being, of course, "Sexy Beast". These films both combine great style, magnetic performances from the currently best British actors, compelling story lines and sense of warmth emanating from perfectly cast protagonists; Owen and Winstone, respectively.

Martin Scorsese is a director who immerses his audience in the meticulous details of the criminal underworld; Quentin Tarantino takes Scorsese's conventions and infuses pop culture and a wry sense of humor. Both owe a debt to Mike Hodges, who was making crime thrillers (including the original "Get Carter") before either one of them came along. Owing more to the classic film noir style of early cinema than its contemporary imitators, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is well-structured, tightly paced, and genuinely enthralling with a minimal reliance on flashy visuals and booming violence. When young, charismatic drug dealer Davey Graham (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) takes his life after inexplicably being raped one night, his brother Will (Clive Owen)--a former mobster gone into voluntary exile as a woodsman--returns to avenge his death, but not without finding out why first. This forces him to reconcile with characters he's become estranged from (including former girlfriend Charlotte Rampling, who still possesses a striking luminosity after all these years), to the point where his immersion back into the bustling real world is as much a part of the plot as the revenge itself. He's a man of few words, with a vague history and an undeniable physical presence--in scenes of exposition (particularly the explicit discussions of rape), Hodges conveys Will's delicate internal outrage through a minimum of means. Perhaps the key factor to the success of "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is its graceful unwillingness to bend to the altar of crass one-liners and loud explosions, instead opting for a maturity that goes unseen in many of today's crime thrillers.