A sleepy thriller Jamie Foxx apparently slept through.
Sleepless
Grade: C
Director: Baran bo Odar
Screenplay: Andrea Berloff
Cast: Jamie Foxx (Django Unchained), Michelle Monaghan (Patriot’s Day)
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hr 35 min
by John DeSando
You may go sleepless while watching this abduction thriller with a couple of stars, Jamie Foxx and Michelle Monaghan. They're Las Vegas PD detectives involved in drug busting with all the kidnap, corruption components in place.
The outstanding element is the awareness that an Oscar winner--Foxx--can be wasted in a hum-drum actioner that surprises not at all. Believe me when I tell you that if you stirred Liam Neeson in with this script, you’d know the difference only by the skin color of the kidnapped children.
Although director Odar does a competent job with the foot races and car chases, they are still boiler-plate staples of the genre. While Foxx spends most of the film improbably finding his son, losing him, finding him again in an almost Groundhog Day motif, the action becomes tedious quickly. His life-threatening-wound is ludicrously not debilitating except for a few high-priced Oscar grunts that end up immobilizing a goon or two who have no similar disabilities.
It was a dismal afternoon when I saw Sleepless because I love cinematic visuals and watching Michelle make something out of nothing. Otherwise, you'll be more careful about the safety of your children. That's the good part.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
