SLEEPING DOGS (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Sleeping Dogs, The Avenue

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 21, 2024

The question remains whether or not it's fair to knock a mystery for having a predictable solution. One's guess is usually as good as anyone else's when it comes to getting ahead of a mystery like the one in Sleeping Dogs, in which a retired police detective with memory loss starts looking into a decades-old murder. For those who do like to guess, you pick a suspect, hope the potential culprit isn't a red herring, and find yourself correct or completely wrong by the time the answer arrives.

We all do it to some degree or another, so it would be unfair not to acknowledge that reality of the experience of watching a mystery tale. Co-writer/director Adam Cooper's movie seems to be aware of that audience tendency, because his story is filled with so many distractions and deflections that we start to wonder if movie itself has forgotten the story it's meant to be telling. In a weird way, the evasive nature of the plotting is the biggest giveaway as to what's actually happening here.

On its face, the screenplay, written with the director by Bill Collage and based on an E.O. Chirovici novel, is about Roy Freeman (Russell Crowe), a man with advanced Alzheimer's who is currently undergoing an experimental treatment to repair the damage of that disease. Roy can't remember anything about himself, his life, his work, or even basic, everyday things when we first meet him. There are notes scattered about his home, reminding him of his name and how to use a toaster.

This is very inconvenient when a man on a death row named Isaac Samuel (Pacharo Mzembe), who's scheduled to be executed in about a month, claims that he's innocent of the brutal murder for which he was convicted. The man wants answers, so through a non-profit organization, he reaches out to Roy and his former police partner Jimmy (Tommy Flanagan) to talk about the investigation. Only Roy responds, and talking to the condemned man in prison, he believes Isaac might be telling the truth about his innocence.

As it turns out, Roy's condition is terribly convenient (as in it feels a bit exploitative in addition to being contrived) for the plotting of this story. Roy has to look at the case, files and photos for which he just happens to have in his apartment, with new eyes, and sure enough, there are people with more likely motives to have killed a rather stuffy professor named Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas) than the man who's about to die for the crime.

The result is a pretty straightforward dissemination of clues and suspects, only slightly intriguing by way of a significant section of the back story being relayed by the biased written memories of another dead man. He's Richard (Harry Greenwood), who almost had to leave college on account of financial troubles following his father's death but was saved by Wieder's apparent generosity.

The two men connected by way of Laura Baines (Karen Gillan), the professor's student assistant at the time and a brilliant mind in her own right. Her and Wieder's research before his murder had to do with memory.

If that seems a little too appropriate given the fact that our mostly inactive protagonist is dealing with memory issues, Cooper and Collage mainly seem to hope that the apparent detour into Richard's memoir, the revelations of the professor's ethical problems and extracurricular dalliances, and the questions about why Laura seemed to disappear after her mentor's violent death will keep us from noticing something so obvious. In case those things aren't enough, Jimmy seems a little uncomfortable talking about this case, and the professor's groundskeeper (played by Thomas M. Wright) was one of the first subjects of the professor and Laura's experiments, which suppose that trauma can essentially be erased from a person's memory.

It's all too convoluted for its own good, and that's not even accounting for how it shoves Roy, played with conviction and sad flashes of vulnerability by Crowe, into the backdrop. This definitely isn't accounting for how suspicious that move is on its face, either, and one has to question the logic of a mystery that could be clarified in an instant, if only a character recalled or intuitively figured out how to properly open a picture frame.

By the end of Sleeping Dogs, it almost doesn't matter that the solution to this mystery is self-evident, because the more frustrating part is how much extraneous effort the filmmakers take to try to hide that from us. In the process, it loses both the plot and any reason to care about why the puzzle needs to be solved.

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