Written by: Andrea Berloff (screenplay), Frédéric Garden & Nicolas Saada & Olivier Douyère (based on the film "Nuit Blanche" written by)
Directed by: Baran bo Odar
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney, Scoot McNairy, David Harbor, Gabrielle Union
Rated: R
My rating is simple, Watch It, It Depends, Skip it. Read my previous movie reviews!
Plot
A cop playing both sides of the law makes a deal with a nightclub owner to recover his kidnapped son.
Verdict
This feels a lot like a Jean Claude Van Damme '90s action movie with the poor plot and thin characters, but Sleepless has fewer splits and leg kicks. This follows the rule of cool whether it makes sense or not, but it's not even that exciting. It completely fails at being cool. The consistent lack of logic is agitating.
It keeps a quick pace at the lack of building Jamie Foxx's character. A few scenes that provided insight into the protagonist would have helped build tension, but this is a shallow film with stupid characters that make illogical choices.Skip it.
Review
I like cop movies but this is boiler plate. It's the same old tropes we've seen before with a muscle car driving cop and his battle with Internal Investigations. His son is kidnapped and he'll do anything to get him back.
This has more than a few ridiculous gimmicks. The bad guys torture a guy on a baseball field by stringing him up and aiming a pitching machine at him. How do you not get seen at an obviously well maintained park? It doesn't make sense but so much of this movie doesn't make sense. It's attempt to be cool that fails horribly.
There's a fight in the kitchen with knifes placed all over the kitchen. A cast iron skilled to the head doesn't slow the bad guy down, but throwing him throw a glass window does. Nearly every fight in this movie involved glass shattering. These fights should be more fun, but they're dull. This doesn't have the polish of a Bourne fight or the roughness of a street fight.
The bad guy who seemingly wants to kill Jamie Foxx and has a perfect shot instead shoots glass. This director seems to think shattering glass is the pinnacle of any good fight scene. This movie is a good example of how directing can bring a movie down. A good director wouldn't save this but it would make it slightly more bearable. Maybe the director did music videos previously, because even the soundtrack is obnoxious and intrusive.
Nothing these characters do follows any kind of logic. Foxx's wife drives into a smoke filled garage, hears gun shots and grabs a gun from the glove box to investigate. I'd be reversing out of there.
Foxx kills one bad guy, but not another. The reason? Just so we can have another fist fight.
There should be tension as to whether Foxx is good or bad, but there is no ambiguity. We don't know this character well enough to even guess. We have to accept what the movie tells us at face value. This is a joke of a movie.
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