Sleeping Dogs (2024) Dir: Adam Cooper
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I decided to watch this Adam Cooper directed detective thriller on a whim one evening. It hasn't had particularly good ratings, but I decided to go ahead and watch it anyways. It had a fairly interesting premise; My thoughts immediately went to 'Memento', and besides, I haven't seen many 2024 releases.
The film is based on 'The Book of Mirrors'; by E.O. Chirovici, which I saw had fairly good ratings, this at least boaded well for the narrative's basic cohesion. However, the screenwriters; Bill Collage and Adam Cooper, must have absolutely butchered it, because this was terrible.
The screenplay force-fed the audience crumby exposition and dragged out, poorly written dialogue, which felt like nails on a chalkboard. Honestly, it made me want to bang my head against the wall. The plot staggered and stumbled like a drunkard after a bad night out.
The characters were all paper thin, the so-called twists were incredibly predictable and the eventual climax was extremely disappointing in its execution, never mind how mind-numbingly obvious it was. I very nearly turned it off, but I figured I'd stick with it, if only for the sake of this review.
Some of the camerawork was very poor, bordering in amateurish at times. But it was nothing compared to the rotten cinematography, complete with ugly filter and tacky lens flares to boot. Add to this a generic soundtrack and some dodgy sound design and you can see why I spent most of the film wincing.
Russell Crowe was the only actor who had any decent scenes at all, and even those were few and far between. His acting felt forced and borderline phoned-in. This was a damp squib of a performance. Ultimately, Crowe's performance, just like the rest of this film, struggled to reach even adequate levels of quality.
Karen Gillan gave the worst performance I have ever seen from her. Her accent was atrocious and her delivery was laughable - it legitimately felt like she had woken up on set having lost all her talent. I really like her as an actress, but this was just awful.
Tommy Flanagan was the most hapless of a hapless bunch of supporting cast members. It felt like he was playing a parody of a painfully generic ex-cop, but that was just how bad his performance was.
As far as notable cast members, the only ones I care to mention are Martin Csokas, Harry Greenwood and Thomas M. Wright, though not because any of them were particularly good, they just had substantial enough roles to warrant name-drops.
Overall, there's no way around it; this is a truly awful film. It's no wonder it garnered little-to-no attention, and was quietly released on Prime after a very limited and disappointing theatrical release. There are few films I regret watching, but I think this may be one of them. It wasn't even a 'so bad it's good'' film, it was just bad.
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