Sleeping Dogs (2024)
Directed by Adam Cooper
The Avenue, R (sexuality, violence), 112 minutes.
★★★★
Sleeping Dogs was one of the biggest duds on 2024 insofar as attracting an audience goes. Not many would expect a Russell Crowe film to make a mere $1.9 million worldwide. I blame this on poor marketing because it’s a very good thriller. Maybe the youth crowd got confused as there is a popular video game of the same name whose creators considered and then sandbagged a movie based on the game.
The film’s title comes from the aphorism for non-interference: “Let sleeping dogs lie.” That’s not advice that Roy Freeman (Crowe) wishes to follow. He’s a retired homicide cop but has Alzheimer’s disease and lives alone in an apartment filled with masking tape instructions for simple things, such as “My name is Roy Freeman” and how to heat frozen dinners safely. He also has two wicked scars atop his shaved head from experimental deep brain stimulation that might help him regain some memory. Now would be a good time for that to occur as he is contacted by a social worker to see Issac Samuel (Pachero Mzembe), a young black man on death row. He confessed to murder of high-profile Professor Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas) ten years ago, but insists he didn’t do it. He’s only alive because of a delay of his execution.
Roy lost his marbles, but kept his files. Still, he has no memory of anything he reads. He tracks down former partner Jimmy Remis (Tommy Flanagan) who tells him to let it alone; Samuel confessed and his fingerprints were all over Wieder’s apartment. Against his better judgment, Jimmy agrees to help. Roy has a memory snippet of a guy who showed up the day Wieder’s body was removed, his face beaten to a broken, bloody pulp. That’s a real dead end, as he turns out to be Richard Finn (Harry Greenwood) whose body lies in the morgue. So who else was close to Wieder? Quite a few, it seems; Wieder preyed on his graduate student assistants, including Laura Baines (Karen Gillan) who claims she wrote the paper Wieder planned to publish as his. Roy and Jimmy also wonder about her and a handyman named Wayne Devereaux (Thomas M. Wright), one of Wieder’s patients who had undergone one of the professor’s controversial treatments to recover from PTSD from his time in Iraq. And whatever happened Diane Lynch (Lynn Gilmartin), a barmaid who seemed to know all of the principals, some of them in the Biblical sense.
Whew! Try solving all of this with one and half brains. Director Adam Cooper tells all this in the time-tested way of now-then-now. We surmise what Roy cannot; Wieder was a creep, the investigation was fishy, Finn was a bit of a weirdo, and Baines was a hot mess. So, to pose the big question in all mysteries: Who done it? An additional conundrum is why can’t Roy let the sleeping dog lie given his lack of memory?
Sleeping Dogs is not a perfect film. Crowe is often unconvincing as an Alzheimer’s sufferer. He is seen poring over old files and trying to find his cop mojo, but anyone who has seen someone in the thralls of Alzheimer’s will find Crowe too rational and too lucid. Likewise, the deep brain stimulation he undergoes is real, but when it “works,” it merely slows down the advance of the disease; it’s not a cure and it does not reverse preexisting damage. (Where’s Daniel Day Lewis when you need an actor who understands how to show disability?) You might also find that it stretches credulity that it took so long for anyone to realize that a new hotshot in the field of psychology is Baines under a new name. She and her alter ego look identical with only a box of Miss Clairol’s difference.
Of much more relevance, though, is that the film’s resolution is shocking on several levels. By the time it rolled around I was engrossed in a “Holy smokes!” kind of way. So why did it bomb? Theory: It’s billed as an “American crime thriller,” but it’s not. You might detect that you don’t know most of the actors and–to add an air of mystery of my own–the tone doesn’t “feel” American. It was actually made in Australia and none of the actors are from the USA. But don’t let that deter you.
Rob Weir
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