I'll Sleep When I'M Dead

Ok ok so this has picked up some bad reviews.. Personally i LOVED this film! Will plays the hard man ex con trying to get a normal life back, working for cash jobs labouring.His kid brother, a cocky smart ass drug dealer gets shafted by a nasty car dealer, to teach him hes a piece of nothing. This scene was quite nasty, very well acted without being too graphic. Will is taunted by old rivals but holds his cool . When he finds out who raped his brother, however, the gloves are off, the old Jag gets dusted down & he comes gunning for revenge.... to find out more, SEE THE FILM!!!

A shameless and empty retread of Get Carter by the director of, er, Get Carter.

Clive Owen is Will Graham, Britain's best looking and most thoughtful hardened former gangster, but he's had 'some sort of breakdown' and grown a symbolic beard. He's now a (cough) lumberjack in a forest that's about as convincing as a department store Santa's grotto. Even there the cards are stacked against him - it's all numbers these days, you see... Will Graham's brother gets raped by a car salesman for no apparent reason, and then said brother kills himself in a bath. He's traumatised, you see; we know this because he's unconvincingly sick into his bedsit toilet.

From there it's a series of barely explained encounters and stilted, badly acted scenes before Clive enacts bloody revenge on his brother's attacker (Malcolm McDowell). Clive's traumatised too; we know this because he's slightly more convincingly sick next to some waste ground. Gritty.

The script sounds as if it was translated from a French existentialist film written by a sixth former, who has included Ms C Rampling in the cast as some sort of vague former love interest of the Clive Owen character. Obviously, gangsters are always getting together with quasi intellectual restaurant owning older women.

Even the costumes look like they were chosen by someone on work experience; selecting from a collection of nasty mid 1990's numbers. At least we know who the (mid-lower level) baddies are - they're signposted by having peroxide blonde hair; a strange henchman penchant for the Marilyn look.

The most affecting scene in the film is 'Mickster' (a character in the film....) finding 'Davey' (the barely introduced and unsympathetic younger brother character in the film) after Davey's suicide - no no no no no he cries. Should you bother watching this film? Ask Mickster.

This isn't a bad film, it's just that it has nothing in particular to recommend it. I got it for $2 in a used disk place, thinking that the cast was as solid as you could get, from McDowell and Rampling to Owens. Alas, it is a mood film with no caper to it about horrible, uninteresting losers who are headed towards the worst kind of self destruction. Aside from Owens, the acting is rather flat, to say the least, completely without sparkle or creativity. The plot is rather humdrum: a "reformed" hoodlum comes back to investigate a strange death and is horrified by what he discovers and had to decide what to do. I'll give you 3 guesses how it ends. Well, maybe one.

Not recommended.