Respond to these rapid questions in our Sleepless quiz and we will tell you which Sleepless character you are. Play it now.
“Sleepless” is one of those films that either needed to be significantly better or significantly worse in order to make much of an impact. When a Las Vegas police officer attempts to recover his kidnapped son from bad guys, the story turns out to be frustratingly not-terrible, which is a relief. When the action sequences, the characterizations, and the performances come together, they could have formed a fine example of what used to be referred to as a B-movie: a genre film that doesn’t have a lot of money to play with but makes up for it with ingenuity and style. But they don’t. Despite this, “Sleepless” never quite manages to reach that level of excellence. Its few moments of excellence only serve to make the rest of the film, which is a muddled mash of conspiratorial plotting, close-quarters fistfights, and gunfights, appear lamer. This remake of the 2011 French film “Sleepless Night,” directed by Baran bo Odar (2010’s “The Silence”) and scripted by “World Trade Center” writer Andrea Berloff, is at times amusing but never amusing enough, exciting at times but never exciting enough, and inherently emotional (primarily due to the hero’s anguished desire to save his son) but never willing to run with the emotionalism and turn into a full-blown action melodramatic drama.
In a nod to the original French film, “Sleepless” opens in the middle of a car chase, with Las Vegas police detective Vincent Downs (Jamie Foxx) and his partner Sean Cass (Taylor Lautner) stealing a massive shipment of cocaine from drug dealers working for local crime boss Rob Novak (Scoot McNairy), who supplies a local hotel and casino owner named Stanley Rubino (Dermot Mulroney) with party favors The bad guys kidnap Vincent’s son Thomas (Octavius J. Johnson) in order to reclaim the drugs they stole from him.
The rest of the film unfolds as an intimate, somewhat contained “Die Hard” spinoff, with Vincent sneaking around the grounds of the hotel and casino in an attempt to save his son from certain death. The more immediate task of preventing his son’s death serves as a stand-in for the repair work he needs to do in his own home: Vincent is divorced from his wife Dena (Gabrielle Union) and on bad terms with Thomas as a result of his immersion in his job, and the theme of repairing frayed family ties is never far from the mind of the film’s creators and audiences alike throughout. A stab wound he sustained during the opening action sequence necessitates Vincent’s further improvisation, and his already stressful situation is exacerbated by the need to pause between fistfights and deft moments of subterfuge to tend to the wound on his side. Because the protagonist is so preoccupied with the task of saving his son and recovering stolen drugs without his superior officers discovering it, his own adrenaline serves as a makeshift anesthetic, which provides many of the film’s infrequent moments of comedy. Both he and the audience are prone to forgetting the agony he’s in until the action stops and he realizes that he’s in excruciating pain again.
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Meanwhile, there’s a subplot involving Vincent’s colleague, Detective Jennifer Bryant (Michelle Monaghan), who was recently assaulted while participating in an undercover drug bust gone wrong. Jennifer and her partner Doug Dennison (David Harbour) are investigating the situation at the hotel, and as they uncover connections between the two cases, “Sleepless” takes on the feel of a conspiracy thriller, with the heroes piecing together connections that lead them to realize their adversaries don’t have the motivations and goals they thought they did. I’m being deliberately vague here because, despite the fact that many of the film’s twists are foreshadowed months in advance, they’re executed flawlessly enough to provide jolts to the film at precisely the right moments.
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The film’s most serious flaw is its inability to establish a consistent tone and maintain it throughout the film, or even from one scene to the next. Although there are enough Jason Bourne-style, heavily improvised fight scenes (including a couple of keepers staged, respectively, in a kitchen and a jacuzzi room) to distract from the knowing ludicrousness of the story, these action moments are executed in such a rote way (all fast cuts and swinging camerawork) that it’s never possible to appreciate them on their own terms, much less find beauty or terror in them. The film is dour but not grim or horr
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Foxx is an excellent action hero; he is capable of almost anything the film requires of him, and his laid-back demeanor in this film is effective up to a point. Even so, it’s still far too easy to imagine someone else in the role who brings something more to the table than Foxx does. A couple of decades ago, a slightly more edgier action star like Bruce Willis or Denzel Washington would’ve played the hell out of Vincent, infusing the film with a nihilistic edge that would’ve worked wonders for the film. McNairy and Harbour, in particular, give off the vibes of 1940s tough-guy character actors. But, as a whole, the cast is hampered by material that provides them with just enough information to construct playable characters, but not enough information to make them truly sing and dance. In addition, the film can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be as realistic as possible (given the circumstances) or whether it wants to embrace the silliness and push it into the realm of the absurd. Some flourishes that might have worked brilliantly in another film come across as clumsy here, such as the use of tear gas in a key action scene populated by characters who aren’t wearing gas masks: no one appears to be harmed by the chemicals, so it’s as if the film included it solely to make the scene smoky and cool-looking.
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It’s possible that “Sleepless” could have gone in a number of different directions. A confident and focused director might have been able to turn the story into an action-packed neo-noir about police and criminals on society’s bleak fringes, or perhaps a black comedy about men and women who find themselves in way too deep water. Vincent’s desperation has an almost touchingly humorous quality to it: he’s clearly a guy who has been gambling with his own life for quite some time, and he now finds himself trapped in a literal casino where the odds are stacked against him; his anguish and shame are heightened by the knowledge that the house always wins.
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Although this may have been the intention (and there are enough overtly metaphorical elements in the script to make us believe it was), the intention does not come through. Instead of being merely professional but uninspired, the film might have stood out more if it had been aggressively trashy, obnoxious, or dumb; at the very least, the audience wouldn’t have spent much of the running time of “Sleepless” wondering if the filmmakers ever had anything other than setting up yet another variation on the long-running franchise “Taken,” which wasn’t deep and didn’t pretend to be but nevertheless had an electrifying, sleazy
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