SLEEPLESS Review: A Foxx Hunt With Diminishing Returns
The difference between the Jamie Foxx-starrer Sleepless and the 2011 French/Belgian/Luxembourgian film Sleepless Night (Nuit Blanche) on which it’s based can be summed up by comparing how they conduct themselves in the kitchen. Both films have significant scenes set in the food-preparation areas of their central settings, and in the original, director/co-writer Frédéric Jardin involved its staff in the action, as the hero’s pressed-into-service assistants or bemused witnesses to his fisticuffs. In the new film, when the protagonist similarly gets into a protracted brawl with an opponent amidst the counters and sinks, the workers make themselves scarce, leaving them to fight alone.
The loss of that wit and character eccentricity will be keenly felt by anyone who has seen Sleepless Night before taking in the remake. For those who haven’t (which will likely be 99.999 percent of the audience), Sleepless is a serviceable but undistinguished crime actioner. To be sure, it’s better than its lack of advance critics’ screenings would suggest; worse movies get previewed for the press all the time (see, or don’t, The Bye Bye Man, also opening today). Nevertheless, this is yet another case of a reboot that would likely never have inspired imitation if it had come first. (For the record, Sleepless Night has now been redone twice—the first time as 2015’s Indian production Thoongaa Vanam.)
The plot of Sleepless, for the most part, follows the basic beats of its predecessor. Bad cop Vincent Downs (Foxx) and his partner Sean (rapper T.I.) pull a late-night theft of a duffel bag full of cocaine, earning the enmity of the drugs’ intended recipient, Las Vegas casino owner Stanley Rubino (Dermot Mulroney). Rubino owes the coke to local crime boss Rob Novak (Scoot McNairy), who in turn needs it to please his unseen father, and with all that pressure trickling down, Rubino has Vincent’s teenage son Thomas (Octavius J. Johnson) kidnapped to force Vincent to return the goods. Yet after Vincent goes to the casino and hides the bulk of the cocaine in the ceiling of the men’s room as insurance, it is quickly swiped by Jennifer Bryant (Michelle Monaghan), an Internal Affairs agent smarting from a bust gone wrong, who wants to prove herself by nailing Vincent as well as the baddies with whom he’s gotten into hot water.
This agreeably complicated setup is just preamble to the meat of Sleepless, in which the characters hunt and chase each other all over the casino: Vincent striving to rescue his son, Bryant attempting to apprehend Vincent and everyone trying to get their hands on the coke. Along the way, Swiss director Baran bo Odar stages a trio of knock-down-drag-out one-on-one confrontations that, the aforementioned lack of idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, deliver the basic, brutal goods, particularly when Vincent and Bryant have at it in a hotel room. In the home-stretch action, however, strobe lighting and too-busy cutting make it difficult to discern who’s doing what to whom, and Odar loses control of the narrative; things eventually become so chaotic that even the movie seems to forget where the bag of drugs has gone. That’s a particular shame when compared to Jardin’s work, which maintained a hurtling pace with a constantly mobile camera, yet never at the expense of coherence or clarity.
Written by Straight Outta Compton Oscar nominee Andrea Berloff (who brought more rude personality to her script for last year’s Mel Gibson vehicle Blood Father), Sleepless tries hard to maintain sympathy for Vincent even as he gets himself into deeper and deeper trouble. Estranged from Thomas and divorced from his wife Dena (Gabrielle Union)—who keeps cell-phoning Vincent, wondering where their son is—and suffering from a stab wound, he also might not be as bad a guy himself as he first appears. (That’s just one of the secrets and hidden motivations revealed as the movie proceeds, some of them more surprising than others.) Foxx plays Vincent’s desperation and determination to the hilt, and is well-matched with Monaghan, who brings gusto to the tenacious Bryant. Yet their roles never truly come alive; lacking the grace notes and quirks Jardin and his co-writers brought to their characters, everyone in Sleepless feels like a plot pawn, serving the story rather than inhabiting it with individual personalities.
Sleepless also lacks the crazy energy to truly put across its convoluted scenario that Jardin’s movie had to spare. The latter also did something Sleepless doesn’t: It made its central setting, an expansive Paris nightclub, a character in and of itself, which Odar can’t manage here—no matter how many helicopter shots of Vegas he throws in, apparently to cover up for the fact that the bulk of his film was lensed in Georgia. For all its twists and turns and betrayals and reversals and occasional bursts of excitement, Sleepless ends up feeling standard-issue in the long run.
