Intentionally or not, Sleeping Dogs invites comparison to Memento. In Adam Cooper’s steadfastly self-serious directorial debut, a bedraggled ex-homicide detective, Roy Freeman (Russell Crowe), is tasked with solving a brutal murder that he can’t recall due to his memory loss. But the comparison to Christopher Nolan’s breakout doesn’t do Sleeping Dogs any favors. For one, we know we’re in trouble from the moment we see Freeman stumbling through a decrepit apartment, its otherwise sparse walls adorned with handwritten messages that exist as much for his benefit as ours, like the unfortunately hilarious “YOU HAVE ALZHEIMERS.”
From the start, the film lays it on thick. Freeman’s apartment has all the markers of someone whose mind is slowing deteriorating: staplers that have been left in water glasses, melted pieces of technology in the microwave, and half-eaten meals on top of furniture. The man wears the thickest head bandage you’ve ever seen, administered as a result of an elective procedure that he pursued to help regenerate his damaged neural pathways. And in case it isn’t clear what the man is up against, we even get several flashbacks to a surgeon telling him that…he has Alzheimer’s.
An adaptation of Romanian author E.O. Chirovici’s novel The Book of Mirrors, the film focuses on Freeman being approached by the fictional Clean Hands Project, a charitable organization that helps free wrongfully convicted felons, to help one Isaac Samuel (Pacharo Mzembe) exonerate himself from a 10-year-old tabloid murder of a prominent academic, Wieder (Marton Csokas). Freeman agrees to meet with Samuel as he sits on death row, and through yet more flashbacks that make outlandishly flagrant use of fragmented angles and fish-eye lenses, it’s insinuated that there might be something non-kosher about Freeman’s days as a detective.
Turns out, Freeman didn’t lose his job because he has Alzheimer’s, but because he got into a drunk-driving accident. So while he agrees to take on Samuel’s case because his doctor tells him that he needs something to do to keep his mind “active,” like doing a puzzle, one imagines that some part of Freeman is looking for redemption. But Sleeping Dogs isn’t really interested in what haunts Freeman so much as it is in how his condition stands in the way of his sleuthing.
Freeman can understand complicated directions and knows where to go day to day but has a pointedly hard time remembering his own name. Nonetheless, he pushes on and enlists the help of his former partner, Jimmy Remis (Tommy Flanagan), whose skepticism of Freeman’s condition is apparently superseded by his own boredom in retirement. And, as if the plot of Cooper’s film weren’t convoluted enough, Freeman comes across a steamy unpublished manuscript by Richard Finn (Harry Greenwood), whose recollections of his time as an assistant to Wieder prompts the film to almost entirely switch perspectives.
At one point, Finn gets embroiled in a romance with Laura Baines (Karen Gillan), a brilliant young student who’s pulled between Finn and Wieder. Throughout this stretch of the film, which is as pulpy and as it is maudlin, it’s hard to know if Gillan’s performance, which suggests a cross between Faye Dunaway in Chinatown and Miss Piggy, is a purposeful reflection of Finn’s self-serving memoir or just plain-old failure of directorial ambition. Baines and Wieder are working on an experimental drug that can “make you forget past traumas.” It’s a charmingly hokey bit of faux-science that also comes across as exceedingly convenient, what with Freeman investigating a case that’s about memory while he himself is struggling to retain his own.
As Sleeping Dogs cuts between Freeman’s Alzheimer’s-ridden pursuit of the truth and the various other subplots, Cooper never manages to turn the script’s cockamamie and vague meditations on memory and subjectivity into something remotely, and intentionally, entertaining. Too many scenes aren’t much more than purely expositional, which gets exhausting pretty quickly, though the hulking Crowe’s commitment to the material, especially as Freeman tries to piece together a maelstrom of dotty evidence at the same time as he fumbles with medication, can be fun to watch. Pity that the mystery at the film’s center isn’t a reflection of Freeman’s condition so much as the case itself, which gives Sleeping Dogs the feeling of wearing a hat on a hat. Or, in this case, an oversized beanie over a hospital bandage.
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