SYNOPSICS
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003) is a English movie. Mike Hodges has directed this movie. Clive Owen,Malcolm McDowell,Jonathan Rhys Meyers,Charlotte Rampling are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2003. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003) is considered one of the best Crime,Drama,Mystery,Thriller movie in India and around the world.
Will Graham is a gangster who has left the life of crime and is living in the countryside. He comes out of hiding to investigate the death of his brother when he learns that he committed suicide. Charlotte Rampling is his old girlfriend who owns a restaurant. Boad is the villain responsible for the bad things that happened to Will's brother.
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I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003) Reviews
good movie
Not predictable like most revenge dramas. Nice to see Clive Owen's character actually in love with someone his own age. Interesting music, if a little distracting. Very dark. Not a family flick. Not a date flick. Well written. Great acting by most characters. It was too short. It was a big build up to a very short denouement, but I guess that suits the tone and the theme of the film. Not sure why people gave this such low marks. I guess they were expecting Lock stock or snatch seeing as its kind of in the British gangster genre. If you go in expecting that, then you will be disappointed. What was great about this movie was that we slowly got to know the characters without much of significance being said about them outright. It was slow in creating a mood without ever being boring.
Dark, moody and brillant.
Mood, texture and ambiguity in a British crime thriller? You better believe it. ISWID is no conventional revenge thriller. Mike Hodges, whose Get Carter is something of a gold standard for this kind of thing, subverts auidence expectations by producing a similar setup (a ganster related death, the vengeful brother returning to the city to find out what happened) and then proceeding to wrongfoot them by concentrating on the psychological fallout from crime rather than screen violence or genre cliches. A moody Clive Owen plays Will Graham, a former London gangster who became so full of loathing for his life of murder and criminality that he has rejected it totally having moved away and left behind the trappings of organised crime. 3 years on he leads a reclusive, hermit like existence, surviving on odd jobs and living in the back of a van. When his younger brother Davy is raped by local hood Malcolm McDowell, he kills himself, an event that serves as the catalyst for Will's return to his former life as he attempts to find those responsible but perhaps more importantly why they did it. This is a dark, thoughtful piece, less concerned with the usual revenge thriller trajectory than the psychological underpinnings of it's subject matter. It's unusual for this type of film to stop and reflect on events rather than just skip to the inevitable confrontation but Hodges pulls it off not least because his London backdrop is a sinister place where social and moral breakdown are continually in the background. The city has a contaminating effect from which Owen has tried to flee. Crime dehumanises everyone here, both victim and gangster. Much of the movie is about Owen's character attempting to resist a return to his former self but as he learns more about his brother's final hours the guard slips and over the course of the film he gradually transforms back to the killer he once was, culminating in a physical and material change toward the end of the film. It's not a movie that gives you all the answers nor it does it give you everything you expect. You never find out what single event, if any, caused Owen to leave London so you're left to share in the confusion of those around him. It's also unclear what McDowell's relationship is to Rhys Meyers but this simply adds to the sense of unease. In every scene omission suggests hidden layers which force you maintain distance from the characters, making you a less emotion but more thoughtful observer. It could be anticlimatic for those expecting an orgy of bloody revenge, but Hodges would undermine the disguist registered by Owen's character for his violent past by indulging the voyeuristic demands of the audience to witness that violence. The film cuts away from it and introspectively explores its aftermath, not to mention its occasionally tragic inevitablility. Ambiguity is the watchword here because, Hodges suggests, you can't necessarily trust everything you see and hear. "Memories can deceive" Owen's voiceover tells us in the scene that bookends the film, and as everything that follows the introduction is effectively a flashback, we have to consider the possibility that certain scenes are misleading. The focus of the film intially seems to be the rape of Will's brother but this is the hook upon which Hodge's probes the lure and ultimately the consequence of crime. It won't be to everyone's taste but ISWID will have you scrutinising the detail long after you've left the cinema, something which can't be said for too many crime thillers these days. An unsettling, thought provoking film. Recommended.
Character Study of criminals in intertwined stories that slowly comes together
This story starts with several sets of mostly low life characters in various settings and slowly shows how the characters relate. Davey(Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is the self absorbed party animal, low level drug dealer whose tragic events form the glue to tie the characters together. Will (Clive Owen) first appears as a hard working back to nature recluse, but we soon learn he is Davey's brother. We learn that this morose woodsman was some kind of crime boss. His return to deal with Davey's tragedy kicks off the pivotal events that make up the rest of the movie. What looks at first like several disjointed stories slowly starts tying together. This is not your glorified crime life like the Godfather, or the Sopranos. This story is not about action, it's about how criminals think and feel and act based on those thoughts and feelings. It is a dark world, full of bad choices and painful consequences. It is a somewhat complicated story like these kinds of things are in real life. There are old relationships: loves, friends, enemies that must be dealt with in a time when emotion is hard to control. If you want something fast, are looking for clear cut plots, and easily understood characters you will be disappointed. I personally like movies sometimes that are not afraid to break with clear cut formulas and don't feel compelled to explain everything in clear terms. I found the movie very intriguing. This is a movie about how characters, in this case, criminals, process tragic events. These dark characters living in this dark world had to deal with something that was especially dark to them. The story moves slowly because it is not about action, but the dark setting, the subtle effects on the characters as the story progresses and so on. In reality tragic events are often not clear cut, and the movie is real in its development of the story. I found myself feeling for the characters, albeit mostly sadness and a little pity with a little admiration, compassion, and understanding thrown in. If you enjoy film noir I think you might like this film.
smooth noir cocktail
Martin Scorsese is a director who immerses his audience in the meticulous details of the criminal underworld; Quentin Tarantino takes Scorsese's conventions and infuses pop culture and a wry sense of humor. Both owe a debt to Mike Hodges, who was making crime thrillers (including the original "Get Carter") before either one of them came along. Owing more to the classic film noir style of early cinema than its contemporary imitators, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is well-structured, tightly paced, and genuinely enthralling with a minimal reliance on flashy visuals and booming violence. When young, charismatic drug dealer Davey Graham (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) takes his life after inexplicably being raped one night, his brother Will (Clive Owen)--a former mobster gone into voluntary exile as a woodsman--returns to avenge his death, but not without finding out why first. This forces him to reconcile with characters he's become estranged from (including former girlfriend Charlotte Rampling, who still possesses a striking luminosity after all these years), to the point where his immersion back into the bustling real world is as much a part of the plot as the revenge itself. He's a man of few words, with a vague history and an undeniable physical presence--in scenes of exposition (particularly the explicit discussions of rape), Hodges conveys Will's delicate internal outrage through a minimum of means. Perhaps the key factor to the success of "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" is its graceful unwillingness to bend to the altar of crass one-liners and loud explosions, instead opting for a maturity that goes unseen in many of today's crime thrillers.
Too many unanswered plot questions
I was really hoping this movie would be good, but the plot left way too many unanswered questions. One gets the impression that the script was a LOT longer and tons of the movie was just trimmed away, or they ran out of money while making it. A lot of screen time is wasted on scenes which go nowhere to further the plot (brutality scene in the woods, at the rural victim's house, taxi scene, etc.) while the rather significant scenes are left undeveloped. Before one knows it, the credits are rolling, and some very big questions are raised and left unanswered, like: who the hell is McDowell's character and what makes him hate this kid so much that he wants to rape him (the rather flimsy scene describing why is hardly sufficient), what happens to the woman being held hostage (or killed?) by the thug from Belfast, what happens to Will's old gang and to Will himself in the end? I hate to say it, but this movie feels like film that either ran out of money or time or most likely both because I certainly hope the original script had a lot more content than is presented. This one for me was a rental that actually annoyed me when the credits rolled because it felt like buying a pint of beer only to have it spilled after only drinking a quarter of it.