Sleeping Dogs (2024)

2 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Memory Slain

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Frequently clunky and confusing, and a little misguided, the mystery tale Adam Cooper's Sleeping Dogs nevertheless has two things going for it: a pretty decent story and another solid performance by Russell Crowe.

Ex-police detective Roy Freeman (Russell Crowe) has had experimental surgery to hopefully turn around his Alzheimer's disease. He receives a request to visit a death row prisoner, Isaac Samuel (Pacharo Mzembe), whom Roy helped convict a decade earlier, and is about to receive the death penalty. Roy can remember nothing from that time, but he agrees to look at the old files to see if he can find anything.

The victim was renowned psychologist Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas), who developed a radical process for healing trauma. Roy speaks to a few people connected with the case, including psychology student and researcher Laura Baines (Karen Gillan), who worked with Wieder, handyman Wayne Devereaux (Thomas M. Wright), and his own ex-partner Jimmy Remis (Tommy Flanagan). The deeper Roy digs, the more everyone seems to be guilty. But there's still one more layer of the puzzle to go.

Sleeping Dogs comes from a novel by E.O. Chirovici, which would explain why the moving parts of its puzzle work so well. At one point it looks as if everyone is guilty, and it's truly difficult to guess the solution.

Screenwriter Adam Cooper (credited on the "splats" Accepted, Exodus: Gods and Kings, The Transporter Refueled, The Divergent Series: Allegiant, and Assassin's Creed) makes his directorial debut here, and hasn't quite found his footing.

He employs many flashbacks that make things more muddled than they are intriguing. At one point a character is introduced as being with the Department of Defense, and then later, she seems to be associated with a university.

Another problem is the Alzheimer's angle. The Roy Freeman character is introduced as someone with severe memory problems (he leaves notes all around his apartment to remind him who he is, etc.). But once he starts working on the case, he seems fine. (He has received a "radical" treatment designed to create new neural pathways in his brain.) The movie requires that he has no memory of events ten years ago, but that's more like amnesia than Alzheimer's, which feels like an unfair, callous use of a troubling real-life illness.

However, in the role, Crowe finds a quiet grace, a measured thoughtfulness, that's magnetic. It's easy to want to follow him. Sleeping Dogs is certainly flawed, but it works well enough to warrant a late-night viewing.