Sleepless movie showtimes4/17/2023 She’s got plans to expose him, and after he stashes the drugs over a casino men’s-room stall, she goes in there and takes them, removing his only power card. Then there’s the Internal Affairs agent ( Michelle Monaghan) who is sure that Vincent is a dirty cop. But since Vincent is supposed to be delivering the kid to a high-school football game, he has to keep lying to his ex-wife (Gabrielle Union) about the son’s whereabouts (it beats saying, “Uh, sorry, he’s tied up in a kitchen closet somewhere”). To secure and retrieve the drugs, Stanley Rubino (Dermot Mulroney), a natty weasel of a casino owner, has kidnapped Vincent’s 16-year-old son, Thomas (Octavius J. Vincent is now carrying 25 kilos of cocaine (street value: $7 million) that could get him killed. He and his partner (played by the rapper T.I.) just killed two crooks they shouldn’t have, and they also ripped off a more dangerous drug dealer than the one they thought they were working. The film gets a little absurd right at the end, and it wears on a few beats past a natural conclusion, but it’s a strong movie overall, and I think audiences here should get a chance to see the original before the inevitable sequel is released.In “ Sleepless,” a stylishly hollow crime thriller set in Las Vegas, Jamie Foxx plays an undercover cop named Vincent Downs who is up to his goatee in Big Problems. There’s a wonderful scene early on where Vincent uses a dance floor full of young Parisians dancing to “Another One Bites The Dust” that is one of the year’s great pure visual moments. Somehow, he also ended up shooting “Sleepless Night,” and it’s a real master’s class in action shooting. He just wrapped up production on “The Hunger Games,” for example, so he’s a big Hollywood guy. He’s one of Eastwood’s favorite shooters, and he’s done really good work for a lot of filmmakers over the years. I shouldn’t be too surprised, since Tom Stern was the cinematographer. How it’s shot is the other half of why the film delivers on its promise. He has to pull this off, this complicated juggling act, and somehow survive in a building where almost everyone wants him dead, and he has to try to find a way to do all this and still walk away with some sort of real life to return to. It’s great work, and Sisley makes a credible action hero because I buy the stakes. When Vincent realizes he could lose the boy permanently, he realizes just what that would mean to him, and he throws everything he has into saving the boy. Sisley and his relationship with his son is the heart of the film, and even before gangsters show up and threaten his life, his son already sees Vincent as a failure, a disinterested father who only spends time with him out of obligation. Throw in two internal affairs officers, a rival gang of drug traffickers, and it turns into a fairly breathless ride that unfolds over one long evening. And if Vincent wants him back, he needs to bring the cocaine to the nightclub that Marciano owns. Problem is, they screw up the hijack in the opening scene of the film, and although they end up with the drugs, word gets back to Marciano (Serge Riaboukine), the gangster whose stuff they stole, and before Vincent has time to catch his breath, he gets a phone call. He and his buddy are going to hijack a cocaine shipment and make a big score of their own. Tomer Sisley stars as Vincent, a dirty cop who has a great plan. It’s a smart premise in the first place, but then the film is broken into two long movements, one which teaches you every inch of this giant Paris nightclub, and then one where our knowledge of that location pays off in one thrilling scene after another. Together with his co-writer Nicolas Saada, he’s crafted a wickedly smart thriller that erupts into flurries of action in scenes that feel real, not like heightened Hollywood hooey. I walked in knowing nothing about the film, and walked out wondering how Frederic Jardin has gone totally unnoticed so far as a filmmaker. Last week, I ran a series of links out to all sorts of conversations about modern action cinema, and in those various conversations, there many conflicting theories about what works in modern action cinema advanced by the various writers and filmmakers involved.Īction geography has been on my mind for the last few weeks anyway thanks to the screening of “Sleepless Night” that I attended as part of the Toronto Midnight Madness program. Geography is one of the most important things in making an action movie, yet it is one of the most egregiously abused things in most big Hollywood action films.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |