The far from original story involves the settling of a score and the retribution of a once-powerful crime figure who returns from exile to investigate the death of his younger brother. But the twist is that the younger man committed suicide after being sadistically raped by a rich, gangland crime boss. Will Graham (Clive Owen) abandoned his career as a tough, no nonsense crime figure in the London underworld some years earlier. He now wonders throughout England scraggly and bearded in a beat up old camper van, taking odd logging jobs wherever he can find them.

Graham left behind his brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Davey has been leading the life of a playboy, seducing beautiful girls and also dabbling in the drug trade. Davey, obsessed with easy sex and easy money, sells ecstasy and coke at yuppie loft parties and blithely takes whatever he wants – cash from a wallet, and a cigarette lighter from a date’s purse. One night Boad (Malcolm McDowell), a snarling white haired bully and a car dealer with apparently dark connections, brutally rapes Davey in a dark alley. This later precipitates Davy’s suicide.

Sensing something is wrong, Will returns to London and soon learns of Davey’s death from their mutual friend Mickser (Jamie Foreman). Will armed with Davey’s autopsy reports sets out to discover why he killed himself and who may have perpetrated the rape. In the meantime, Will reconnects with his former girlfriend (Charlotte Rampling), a restaurant owner, who begs him to go to the police rather than seek retribution.

Emphasizing mood over content, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead has very little suspense, and what tension there is doesn’t make the movie anymore compelling. The characters wonder around in grim-faced, existential angst, sitting in chauffer- driven cars and walking the subtly lit back streets of London in some kind of subliminal and subconscious daze. The picture is intended to be both opaque and obscure, but this just adds to the narrative confusion and uncertainty.

The players are all passable: Clive Owen does a good job at portraying his trademark tough, hard-hitting blankness, but mostly he just walks through the role. Sylvia Syms is effective in a small cameo as Davey’s doddering and foolish landlady, but we’re never sure what her relationship to Davey and Will actually is. The criminally underused Charlotte Rampling looks suitably grim and dour, although her character is kind of superfluous and she tends to over-interpret her small role.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead really falls apart when it tries to become a kind of psycho-thriller, attempting to analyze and evaluate the psychological make-up of the male rapist. The movie does, however, effectively portray with a kind of no-nonsense and straightforward truth, London’s sad disparity of wealth, and the fog of melancholy and menace that often seeps into many of its streets. Mike Leonard February 05.

Rating: 3 / 5

Building on the fairly weak relationship of Will Graham with his brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, MATCH POINT), the story begins just as it ends, with the arrival and ultimate departure of Will. Interesting in a sort of nonlinear scripting way, the story’s ambling nature and unaffecting characters are impossible to empathize with. When Davey (Meyers) is brutally sodomized by a ruthless man, we care very little because we simply don’t know anything about them. Nor do we know (or are ever told) why Davey was raped in the first place. There is a simple speech given by the rapist (played by Malcolm McDowell) in an attempt at an explanation, but this is neither believable nor seemingly coherent with the script itself.

Which leads us to bigger and better problems. Since this is the crux of the story — and what brings Will (Owen) out of retirement — this leaves the entire film feeling very hollow. The connections between thugs, coroners/cops, and family are thinly developed (if at all) and given so little screen-time as to leave most watchers scratching their heads.

The ending, as stated earlier, mirrors the film’s beginnings in that Will appears standing on the same beach monologuing the same lines. The assumption that the viewer is supposed to make is that this has happened before (i.e., Will has come out of “retirement” in the past for important things), but it comes off feeling stilted and out of place.

Clive Owen does an admirable acting job, but the script given him here is too weak to make this a positive movie-going experience.
Rating: 2 / 5