Sleeping Dogs, which is in theaters Mar. 22, concerns a detective suffering from Alzheimer’s disease who chooses to reopen a past homicide case, and just as this sleuth can’t recollect precisely what took place during that long-ago investigation, Adam Cooper’s film assumes that none of his viewers will recall Christopher Nolan’s Memento or Atom Egoyan’s Remember—two films whose template it follows to a tee, albeit with considerably more noir-ish inflections. As the cop in search of answers that seem to be locked inside his unstable mind, Russell Crowe continues to prove that he’s better than the B-grade projects he’s now offered, but his convincing performance isn’t enough to elevate this surprise-free mystery.
Roy Freeman (Russell Crowe) awakens on his couch in a daze, the top of his head wrapped in a bandage. Looking around his living room, he spies numerous pieces of tape upon which are written his name, his address, directions to other rooms, and the fact that he has Alzheimer’s. It makes little sense that a man in need of such self-penned memos would live by himself, but flashbacks indicate that he’s in the care of a doctor who’s performed an experimental procedure in which electrodes have been implanted in his brain in the hopes of stimulating new neural pathways that will restore his memory. No sooner has he gotten his bearings than he’s called by a lawyer who informs him that Isaac (Pacharo Mzembe), a convict on death row for the murder of college professor Wieder (Marton Csokas), wants to see Roy. Clueless and curious, Roy agrees. During their sit-down, Isaac convinces Roy that he’s innocent of the crime, asserting that despite his confession, he had only been in the professor’s house that night to rob him, and wound up overhearing Wieder’s slaying at the hands of another enigmatic assailant.
Isaac encourages Roy to see Richard (Harry Greenwood), who’s writing a book about the murder. First, however, the former detective—who lost his job due to a calamitous DUI accident—visits his ex-partner Jimmy (Tommy Flanagan), who claims ignorance about Richard and tells Roy that they got their man and to leave it alone. Before he can track Richard down, Roy hears that he’s died of a suspicious fentanyl overdose. Through the type of convenient chance encounter that is this film’s stock and trade, he subsequently receives Richard’s never-published manuscript The Book of Mirrors, which fills in large gaps in the story, all of which director Cooper (working from his and Bill Collage’s script) dramatizes in unreliable flashback. Richard’s story revolves around his relationship with Laura (Karen Gillan), whom he depicts as his lover as well as the research assistant of Wieder. When Richard lost the ability to pay for school, Wieder helped him out and, by doing so, entangled him in a psychosexual love triangle.
“Memory is a fickle thing,” intones Richard in voiceover before musing about the fact that sometimes, pain is so intense that it gets buried deep within the subconscious, and memories of it bubble up in fragments “like pieces of a puzzle.” This is a neon sign-grade tip-off to the secret at the heart of Sleeping Dogs, and that’s without even taking into consideration that, in order to stimulate his brain, Roy sits around his apartment putting together an actual puzzle and staring at a shattered picture frame whose underlying image is impossible to see. Then again, even at this early stage, what’s going on is so obvious that those underlined hints don’t spoil things so much as merely confirm one’s already established conclusions.
Roy soon exposes revelations about Richard, Wieder and Laura’s twisted dynamic, which was rife with romantic and professional jealousies and betrayals. Upon tracking down Laura, who’s now living under a different name, the detective comes to grasp that much of this mess has to do with her thesis about “memory reconsolidation through accelerated resolution therapy” as well as Wieder’s likeminded research. Richard, a writer of literary memoirs, was also fascinated with issues of perception, because memory is the sole thing that preoccupies anyone in Sleeping Dogs. "People make things up all the time. Lie to protect themselves. Manufacture histories to appear more than they are, because the reality is too painful," muses Laura. “Forget about all this,” Jimmy tells his old pal when he won’t stop digging into the past. “It’s such a funny thing, the mind. The things it can live with, and the things it just can't bear,” remarks someone during a momentous face-off. More than any trauma on display, though, it’s these boldfaced statements-of-theme that are truly unbearable.
Cooper often shoots Roy with wide-angle lenses (replete with look-at-me flares) to underscore the protagonist’s distorted POV, and if that formal approach isn’t subtle, it at least lends the proceedings a bit of panache. It’s Crowe, however, who really makes Sleeping Dogs watchable. With his bandage often peeking out beneath his tight wool cap, a neatly trimmed white beard covering his face, Crowe inhabits Roy as a man haunted by fears about what might be lurking within his murky psyche, and determined to right a wrong that he doesn’t fully understand, and his formidable screen presence is nicely offset by the controlled minimalism of his performance. Avoiding histrionics, he embodies Roy as a specter on the trail of other ghosts, and even when the material begins drowning under the weight of its noir affectations—such as slanted-window shadows that cover Roy and the walls of his house—he treats his character not as a genre archetype but as a three-dimensional individual lost in a maze.
Alas, for Roy and anyone who spends two hours with Sleeping Dogs, there’s no escaping the telegraphed destination of this journey. Gillan does a second-rate femme fatale routine, Flanagan acts brazenly shady, and director Cooper goes out of his way to pepper his dialogue with so many foreshadowing comments that there’s minimal reason to stick around until the preordained (if still loose thread-marred) end. “Nobody likes it when things become overly complicated,” opines Wieder to Richard, yet the real problem is that—save for Crowe’s dependably strong turn—what this forgettable film needs are the very sorts of beguiling intricacies it fails to deliver.
