I'll Sleep When I'm Dead Review

DVD Review
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003): A Film by Mike Hodges

"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," I feel, has wasted an hour and forty-five minutes of my life.

Allow me to be more fair.

"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" has wasted an hour of my life.

The problem with this particular piece of film noir is that there is too much noir: too much mystery, not enough explanation. When the payoff finally comes - well, you wish you were a gangster so you could snuff out everyone involved in this frustrating excuse for a gangster film. The audience waits and waits for the carpet to be pulled out from underneath them. The problem is that they stay standing on the carpet the entire length of the film, from the first line of dialogue to the last credit in the reel. Well, what the hell do we do now?

The first half hour or so of the film is fantastic - moody, menacing, and mysterious. Clive Owen plays Will Graham, a gangster who has finally retired to a peaceful, retreated life of lumberjacking. That's right - lumberjacking. He has essentially cut all ties from his former life, including his brother Davey who, since his brother's disappearance, has turned to a life of drug peddling and stealing anything not nailed down to the floor. Also left behind is Will's (apparant) ex-girlfriend Helen, Will's relationship with whom is never particularly explained well, or at all for that matter. For exactly what reason Will left the mob, his family, and his friends behind is never explained either, although one character explains he had a "breakdown." Another refutes that Will is too tough to have ever suffered from one.

The first act of the film has a sort of silent terror to it. We know something inevitably horrendous will happen, but we know not when, how, or by whom. Will, after all, needs to come out of retirement. Wanna know the reason? I'm telling you anyways. Davey slits his own throat for reasons immediately unknown to us or to Will. Davey's close friends say it was a shock - Davey was essentially happy; he had money and a beautiful woman (and, really, what more could you ask for?). Out comes Will for vengence.

I waited the entire film, even until the end credits, to see when the story - and backstories - would start to develop. When would we get to learn more about these characters, thier pasts, their rapports? Why would a seemingly happy young man try to kill himself? What happened in Will's old days as a mobster? Exactly who is Helen, and what happened between her and Will? Question after question develops, but very few are answered. Even when a question is answered, rarely is it a satisfactory explanation. In one of the last few scenes of the film where Will finally gets his revenge, the confrontation lasts not nearly long enough, and the main antagonist's reasoning is so flimsly that I wish as though I could forget it altogether and come up with my own explanation.

So my final question is this, directed at writer Trevor Preston: Why waste a viewer's hour and a half building up anticipation when all you're planning to do is disappoint?

Rating: 1.5 /4 stars