Sleepless
Jamie Foxx stars as a corrupt Vegas cop whose family gets the heat.
No time for shut-eye: Jamie Foxx is sleepless in Las Vegas
Sleep
is not
an option. And don’t even think about eating or drinking. As for loo
time, that’s
when you go to stash your coke behind a ceiling panel. Baran bo Odar's Sleepless is a lean, mean action-thriller
with the accent on action. Once the establishing shots of Vegas are
quickly
dispensed with, we cut to a car chase and then to a brutal shoot-out
and get to
know what an unpleasant piece of work Jamie Foxx really is. He is Vince
Downs,
a trigger-happy vice cop who’s just shot his way to 25k of cocaine
worth $7
million on the street and enough to lift him out of his meagre
lifestyle.
There’s
not
enough time for much backstory, but we know that Vince has a teenage
son,
Thomas (Octavius J. Johnson), and an ex-wife (Gabrielle Union) who is
exasperated by his lack of commitment to his son’s life. However, when
he does
agree to drive Thomas to soccer practice, his son is abducted in broad
daylight
by the goons of one Stanley Rubino (Dermot Mulroney). Of course, Rubino
wants
his cocaine back…
The
Swiss
director Baran bo Odar is none too interested in the minutiae of
character
development. This might seem extraordinary as bo Odar’s breakout film,
the
shocking, gripping, yet all-too human The
Silence (2010), was all about character and the devil’s
details. Here, he
just takes the bare bones of his scenario (based on the French thriller
Nuit Blanche) and ploughs on
regardless,
chucking up new plot developments with breathless élan. It is perhaps
fair to
say that nobody is who they seem, but there’s a delicious hierarchy of
villains
in which Scoot McNairy’s bitter and twisted mobster’s son is perhaps
the most
vile, certainly of this film, if not of the year to date. And it’s
always good
to have a bad guy to despise, particularly as Jamie Foxx himself is no
boy scout. The
really good guy, though, is Michelle Monaghan, an agent from Internal
Affairs
who is not only fighting to prove that Vince is a loose cannon but also
the institutionalised
sexism of her department.
As Sleepless gathers momentum and the fate
of Thomas becomes increasingly inconsequential – there are bigger fish
to flay –
the tension develops accordingly. Of course, there are clichés and a
number of
improbable moments, but for most of its running time the film hits one
like a
triple-shot of espresso.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan,
Scoot
McNairy, Dermot Mulroney, David Harbour, T.I., Gabrielle Union,
Octavius J.
Johnson.
Dir Baran bo Odar, Pro
Roy Lee and Adam Stone, Screenplay
Andrea Berloff, from the screenplay Sleepless
Night aka Nuit blanche by
Frédéric
Jardin, Nicolas Saada and Olivier Douyère, Ph
Mihai Mălaimare Jr, Pro Des Tim
Grimes, Ed Robert Rzesacz, Music Michael Kamm, Costumes Catherine
George.
Riverstone Pictures/Vertigo Entertainment-Entertainment One.
94 mins. USA. 2017. Rel: 5 May 2017. Cert. 15.