Does the film work? All I know is that it stays in my mind for its ambitiously autumnal essence, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea.
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2004)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:85
Fresh:36
Rotten:49
Average Rating:5.5/10
Rated: R [See Full Rating] for language, a rape scene, violent images and brief drug use
Runtime: 1 hr 43 mins
Genre: Dramas
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.... 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]
Starring: Clive Owen, Jonathan Rhys-Myers, Malcolm McDowell, Charlotte Rampling
Starring: Clive Owen, Jonathan Rhys-Myers, Malcolm McDowell, Charlotte Rampling, Frank Stott
Director: Mike Hodges
Director: Mike Hodges
Screenwriter: Trevor Preston
Producer: Michael Corrente, Michael Kaplan
Composer: Simon Fisher Turner
Studio: Paramount Classics
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Reviews for I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
A consciously anti-dramatic, contempo Western, set in Wales and London, in which echoes of oaters ring loud but without much resonance.
A languid study in remorse and revenge that loses its way pretty quickly, sludging through an impenetrable veneer of icy listlessness.
It's dark, it's intelligent -- it's also humorless and a bit pretentious.
Preston's script is a frustrating jumble of provocatively elliptical exchanges and awkwardly obvious exposition.
Works to shake free of noir directives, to the point where it loses direction altogether.
This plodding British revenge thriller has less energy than a pint of Bass that has sat out overnight.
An atmospheric but sluggish and needlessly confusing British contemporary film noir that may indeed leave some audience members struggling to stay awake.
Revenge is a dish served again and again in the movies, and connoisseurs will note the special British flavor that Mike Hodges brings to the table.
[Hodges] still knows how to unspool a mystery with a hypnotic pace of sadistic intrigue.
Hodges, working from a bleak Trevor Preston script, is fascinated by the aspirations, desires, and base compulsions that propel society’s murderous fringe population.
The biggest suspense in "I'll Sleep When I?m Done" is wondering when Clive Owen is going cut his hair.
Hodges is clearly attempting a restrained, art-film ellipticism by letting us know very little about his characters, but because everyone's working hard at being underworld-movie cool, we come away utterly empty-handed.
This is a movie that will put ADD sufferers to sleep, while simultaneously rewarding those who have the patience to see it through.
Many subplots fizzle into nothing and the film drifts out in an ambiguous haze.
Some effort is made to question the macho values of the crime genre, and it is this that best distinguishes I'll Sleep When I'm Dead from other recent British thrillers.
With little investment in their fates and little understanding of their real motives, it's a moribund movie that's caught napping far in advance of its final breath.
| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
|---|---|
| 15% 15% | The Ugly Truth |
| 98% 98% | Up |
| 36% 36% | G.I. Joe: The Rise of … |
| 52% 52% | The Taking of Pelham 1… |
| 45% 45% | Ice Age: Dawn of the D… |
| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
|---|---|
| 36% 36% | Angels & Demons |
| 68% 68% | Funny People |
| 25% 25% | Four Christmases |
| 45% 45% | Shorts |
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