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I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2004)
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Reviews Counted:85
Fresh:36
Rotten:49
Average Rating:5.5/10
Runtime: 1 hr 43 mins
Genre: Dramas
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
Reviews for I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
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.
Hodges builds a quiet and atmospheric sense of foreboding. But it never takes off.
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.
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