I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2004)
Runtime: 1 hr 43 mins
Theatrical Release: Jun 16, 2004 Limited
Box Office: $212,359
Synopsis: Cars full of fast-talking British hoods and rain-soaked city streets in the dead of night--that's the stuff of which Mike Hodges's (CROUPIER) impossibly cool neo-noir gangster thriller is made. Clive Owen plays Graham, a former top mobster who has since retired to a nomadic life in the... Cars full of fast-talking British hoods and rain-soaked city streets in the dead of night--that's the stuff of which Mike Hodges's (CROUPIER) impossibly cool neo-noir gangster thriller is made. Clive Owen plays Graham, a former top mobster who has since retired to a nomadic life in the woods. His little brother Davey (John Rhys-Davies) meanwhile swaggers through posh parties back in the city, dealing drugs and engaging in freewheeling sex and petty thefts until he's violently sodomized by a white-haired car dealer (Malcolm McDowell). His subsequent suicide brings Graham back into the seedy underworld he left behind on a mission of revenge. Before he can find his brother's rapist though, he has to tangle with the new head bad boy in town (Frank Stott), who thinks Graham's come to take his old spot back. Much like Simon Fisher Turner's dissonant, avante-jazz score, the film dodges a straight-ahead story and instead breaks out in moody variations in the key of noir. Fatalistic dialogue, extreme masculine anxiety, a cast teeming with eccentrics, desolate streets, gray beaches, darkened elevators, and foreboding alleyways all blend into an atonal crime-jazz poem. The inestimable Charlotte Rampling plays Graham's concerned, and much older, ex-girlfriend. Fans of the more classic gangster entries may rest assured Graham eventually does rain violence down upon the deserving. [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Clive Owen, Jonathan Rhys-Myers, Malcolm McDowell, Charlotte Rampling, Frank Stott
Screenwriter: Trevor Preston
Producer: Michael Corrente, Michael Kaplan
Composer: Simon Fisher Turner
DVD Info
Release:
Nov 16, 2004
DVD Features:
- Region 1
- Keep Case
- Single Side - Single Layer
- Widescreen - 16:9
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
While the performances are excellent and the Get Carter-in-reverse plot is intriguing, this is a film where atmospherics triumph over the script.
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead deftly traces the sad, steady pulse just under the skin of things . . . the lingering images etching out their own fitting epitaph.
...ended up sending us to slumberland a good deal sooner than the title implied.
Atmospheric post-noir film of the London underworld that never amounts to much of anything.
Next time Mike Hodges wants to make a movie, I would suggest he shoot it in total darkness and drop the dialogue.
[S]trip[s] the mobster film down to its bare essentials, and the result is stark and relentless...
...a kind of inside-out noir, a stately film about the sad progress of a diminished and sad but still frightful and dangerous monster.
Hodges and Preston have a commendable attitude, but with the thin story and shallow characters, even the right idea doesn't seem as interesting as it should be.
... Hodges is the kind of director who can breathe new life into old material with an offhand, deceptively minimalist approach.
In the end, it is the complex aura surrounding Owen's character...that stay with the viewer long after the threads of the story have unraveled in one's mind.
Though the film is your basic revenge tale, it moves at such a snail's pace that the visceral excitement of the genre is nowhere to be found.
A film whose pacing gives new meaning to the term 'sluggish,' and actually makes the charismatic Owen seem boring.
This sad, dark movie moves across the screen like a sleepwalker, aloof and belonging neither to this world nor the next.
Pictures
Around the Network
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead at IGN
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead at AskMen

