I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (0/10)

No need to wait for death. Just see this movie. Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) commits suicide after being raped by Boad (Malcolm McDowell). His brother, Will (Clive Owen), seeks revenge. It takes 102 excruciating minutes to tell this story, most of it shot at night. The first hour and a quarter is meaningless nonsense, after Davey gets raped.

Never will you see a movie that takes itself more seriously than this one. How bad is it? As I was driving home from the screening, I kept saying to myself, “God, that was awful!”

I figure that Clive Owen must be laughing at everyone. He was lionized for his role in an equally slow movie, Croupier (1998), also directed by Mike Hodges. But, let’s face it, all he did in Croupier was to play a phlegmatic, emotionless stoic. Here he is even more laconic, although I wouldn’t have thought that possible. This isn’t what I call acting. I could sleepwalk my way through a movie and not show any emotional reaction to anything just as well as Owen.

Believe it or not, even though this film goes on for almost two hours, there’s little to say about it. It does contain one of the more ridiculous speeches you’ll ever see or hear, however, as Boad explains to Will why he raped Davey. It was so ludicrous I actually laughed out loud. Tina Fey couldn’t write a better parody for Saturday Night Live.

I do have a constructive criticism to add here. Most of this was shot at night. Unfortunately, you could actually see the actors. Next time Hodges wants to make a movie, I would suggest he shoot it in total darkness and drop the dialogue.

June 10, 2004

The End

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