Sleeper Cell: I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003)

I’ve been thinking for the past few days now, and there’s just no way to say with any kind of gentleness (or with the respect that an actor like Clive Owen deserves) how truly terrible a life event it is to sit through Mike Hodges’ hard-boiled thriller I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. I was drawn to this movie, seeing it sitting there on the Blockbuster shelf, because of Clive Owen. I didn’t know who the guy was when I saw The Bourne Identity or King Arthur, which no doubt helped him enter my mind on a level playing field when I saw Sin City for the first time. The movie that was billed as a dark Bruce Willis vehicle ended up reminding us of Mickey Rourke (whose performances in the low-profile Masked and Anonymous and even the higher-profiled  Domino and Once Upon a Time in Mexico went largely unnoticed, aside from his dog) and introducing American audiences to Clive’s particular style of stone-facery. So I picked it up.

Top 5 Haikus for Movies with Complete Sentence Titles:

4 – The hottest day of
the summer, and that’s the truth,
Ruth: Do the Right Thing

DJ Jazzy Bruce

3 – Leo convinces
everyone he’s an actor:
Catch Me If You Can

2 – Warner and Disney
do Bogey and Bacall: Who
Framed Roger Rabbit?

1 – Keaton goes Jazzy
Jeff … with CDs! The Tim I
miss: Batman Returns

It begins with the opening credits gliding onto the screen in a neo-Perry Mason mockery of black lettering on a white background with eerie music and completely inconsistent shadows. The music (a staccato piano reminiscent of 80’s John Carpenter movies) is completely out of place, and had me thinking from the first moment it starts up that this was not going to be a British revenge gangster movie, but a 1960’s Italian vampire horror. So when we get our first shot of live action, with Signor Owen on an English beach in tall waving grass, and it looks like Edward Hopper is the director of photography, it was a nice surprise. Unfortunately, it’s the last good thing about this so-called “hard-boiled” movie.

Edward Hopper

I’m pretty much taking it for granted that no one reading this review is going out of their way anytime soon to see this movie, but let me just drop a friendly warning here in the beginning; this review is just about completely full of *SPOILERS*. So, if you have two hours to burn and are looking to hate your life a little more than you already might, skip the review, and run to Hollywood Video.
If not…

In a nutshell: the movie plays out totally in flashback from the opening scene. Johnathan Rhys-Myers plays Davey; he’s a small-time drug dealer who’s more interested in having a good time than really making money illegally, but hey, it’s something to do, and we see him make an ultra-stealthy, 1-camera angle, bathroom drug deal with a local bird behind a chair-barred door. Slick. All I could think of was all the better drug-dealing scenes throughout film history, and I settled on the gold standard presented by Paul Verhoeven in RoboCop as Bodicker and the local kingpin sit in the gigantic, over-the-top cocaine assembly line factory and Clarence sniffs wine from his fingers. Awesome!

Over the last few weeks Davey has drawn the ire of Malcolm McDowell for reasons McDowell makes painfully unclear by the end of the movie. Something about Davey’s walk and talk just really bugs him. And we see him in his fancy SUV with his cronies looking thoroughly ired.

The cut to the inside of the SUV is accompanied by the incredibly noticeable squeaking of their pants on the leather interior of the car. The whole movie is full of these mysterious sounds that I wonder if any post production sound editing was used at all. There are sirens in the backgrounds of 1-on-1 conversations, there are rustlings of tree branches – it is so much a cautionary tale to sound mixing as to almost warrant a complete re-marketing of the movie for educational purposes.

So, in an act of male dominance and aggression, Malcolm gets two of his stooges to jump Davey in an alley and drag him into an abandoned garage where McDowell… violates him. And I know there‚Äôs probably nobody reading this right now that hasn‚Äôt heard of the brutal scene in Dennis Iliadis‚Äô The Last House on the Left. By comparison, Last House so totally out-risks every other movie that‚Äôs dared flirt with an on-screen violation that all other movies that have ever filmed the act are now grossly un-affecting, and those that try it in the future will be forced to go too far. So in a fit of psychological trauma, Davey commits suicide, after an extended vomiting scene. No visuals, which at this point of the movie is surprising, but there’s enough hacking and coughing so that you start to¬†hope he dies soon. And it‚Äôs not even the only vomit scene in the movie!

I do but bite my thumb, sir.

Hello, Sebastien:
It seems to me that England really only has three bad words outside the traditional f-bomb: ‘bollocks’, ‘wanker’ and multiple forms of ‘piss’ (as in ‘piss it,’ ‘piss on it,’ ‘piss off,’ etc,) that it makes me wonder what about the evolution of the English language in the United States  allowed for the complete explosion of profanity. The easy answer is that we truly are the melting pot, assimilating Spanish, Italian, German and more vulgarities just like we do their methods for deep frying dead animals. So, while the French and Germans so masterfully began to spew actual profane words, the English tended throughout the sixteenth century to more cunningly metaphorize their guttermouths by biting their thumbs and playing with their beards. Ooh burn!

The suicide of course allows for a ‚Äúdiscovery‚Äù scene, where Davey‚Äôs friend goes for a visit and discovers the body in the bathtub, and delivers the one honestly emotional performance in the whole movie. But don‚Äôt worry! The landlady shows up only seconds later to completely take the air out of the scene and render the best friends‚Äô emoting a complete farce. Hand-delivered a motivation, enters the hero. Clive plays Will. He‚Äôs recently out of jail (for some pretty heinous acts according to how people react to him), and is living out of his van. Obviously in a transition phase of his life, he‚Äôs ferrying off to … somewhere (I didn‚Äôt really notice), when he sees a vision of his brother in the empty ferry office. The sighting convinces him he ought to check on the boy only to find out that he‚Äôs suffered the horrible fate. After meeting with his old gang, he proceeds to track down the food chain of ne‚Äôer-do-wells until he inevitably gets to the bad-guy. The scene where he meets his old running buddies is so infinitely better done when Ed Norton, shortly out of prison, visits his old neo-nazi friends in American History X that maybe you should just watch that movie instead. This movie is so hopelessly non-noir and so much more film-grey or off-white that really, it‚Äôs not even ‚Äúsoft-boiled.‚Äù Maybe, maybe poached. Or whichever other way to prepare eggs is the¬†least intimidating.

Texas is on the right track.

A Felon in Motion
Tends to Stay in Motion:
I‚Äôve come to believe that convicted felons obey Newton’s first law of thermodynamics at a fairly reliable rate. According to a study of recidivism done by the California Department of Corrections, over 57 percent of the 54,844 felons who were paroled in 2003, were back in the prison system inside of five years. While the overall rate of female recidivism tends to fall below the fifty percent mark, it seems an obvious conclusion that the only cause of rehabilitation for the men and women in jail is simply the fear that comes with the thought of being re-incarcerated and has virtually nothing to do with any realization of wrong-doing. Obviously, there are those convicted of a felony who serve their jail time amicably, and when released, truly desire to be a more constructive member of a peaceful society, but until there are programs in place to help parolees (such as the reintegration program undertaken by Ivy Anderson-York, Region 1 director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, that helps recent parolees get involved with a Temporary Housing Assistance Program), our prisons will continue to be giant brick carpets under which we constantly try to sweep the dust of society.

Memorable Quotes:
“Davey was buggered.” — Will
“To use a legal term: non-consentual buggery.”¬†– Medical Examiner

The awesomely uninterested Will

Recent posts by Zack

• Zack says, "Go see The Avengers." - May 4th, 2012
• Zack's Take on: The Mite Peckish Games - April 12th, 2012
• Sleeper Cell is Late to the Party for: The Woman in Black - March 25th, 2012
• Review: Another Earth (2011) - August 14th, 2011
• Sleeper Cell: Haute Tension (2003) - June 23rd, 2011

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