Movie Review: Sleeping Dogs (2024)

Genre: Neo-Noir Crime Thriller  

Director: Adam Cooper  

Starring: Russell Crowe, Karen Gillan, Marton Csokas  

Running Time: 112 minutes  

Synopsis: Roy Freeman (Russel Crowe) is a retired cop undergoing experimental treatment for dementia. He is summoned by a death row inmate who claims to have been wrongly convicted for the murder of university professor Dr. Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas) ten years prior. Despite his frail mental health Roy starts to investigate, catching up with his ex-partner Remis (Tommy Flanagan) and re-examining the case evidence, leading to recently deceased author Richard Finn (Harry Greenwood). His unpublished memoir chronicles a romance with ambitious graduate student Laura Baines (Karen Gillan), who was helping Wieder with his research. Freeman's doggedness to uncover the truth ruffles feathers, with unexpected consequences.

What Works Well: A modern film noir, complete with a femme fatale, naked ambition, murder most foul, multiple overlapping motives, infidelity, the whiff of crooked cops, events from long ago haunting the present, and memory loss fueling doomed quests. Director and co-writer Adam Cooper keeps the plot purring with a steady drip of new revelations, and Russell Crowe wears the exhausted and mentally spent cop with the ease of a classic trench coat.

What Does Not Work As Well: The perspective shifts a couple of times, with a long flashback to the Richard Finn/Laura Baines relationship dislodging Roy from the film's centre. The main twist is not difficult to spot, and once the plot discloses all its secrets, it also loses logical coherence.

Key Quote:

Laura: Must be one of the benefits of your condition. Can't remember the bad times.

Roy: Can't remember the good times either.

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Movie Review: Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House (2017)

A political drama and biography, Mark Felt lifts the curtain to reveal a glimpse of the man behind the Watergate information leaks.

It's 1972 in Washington D.C, and legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dies from a stroke. His loyal Deputy Mark Felt (Liam Neeson), a staunch defender of the agency's mission, has every expectation he will be promoted to the top job. Instead the Nixon White House appoints inexperienced bureaucrat Pat Grey (Marton Csokas) as Acting Director. Mark's loyal wife Audrey (Diane Lane) is as disappointed as her husband.

The break-in at the Watergate Hotel starts to the make the news, and Felt mobilizes the FBI to investigate. But in short order pressure mounts from the White House to wind down the probe. Felt finds it increasingly difficult to function in an FBI subjugated by politics and witch hunts, and starts secretly feeding classified information to Time reporter Sandy Smith (Bruce Greenwood) and the Washington Post's Bob Woodward (Julian Morris).

At age 91 in 2005, Mark Felt revealed his identity as the informer known as Deep Throat, and he died just three years later. The film is caught in the gap between his story as a person and his famous whistleblower actions that helped bring down President Richard Nixon. In the end director and writer Peter Landesman, adapting the books by Felt and John O'Connor, offers a middling portrait of the man and a muddled foray into the political scandal.

Mark Felt spends large chunks of time away from the Watergate drama, occupied with an inside look at the FBI's machinations, good and bad. The agency's pride, efficiency and professionalism are a firewall against political interference, and the rot starts to spread when the White House seizes the opportunity of Hoover's death to plant one of their own at the organization's head. Felt tries to defend the fort, but it's a losing battle and eventually he resorts to press leaks as a weapon of last resort.

Maybe because the men surrounding Nixon are largely absent from the narrative and the White House's perspective is conveyed in television snippets, once Watergate erupts and grips the nation, the film is surprisingly inert. Landesman skips explaining the gravity of what Felt passed on to reporters, and a rush to the end credits leaves an empty feeling.

Felt's home life is introduced through a few interactions with his wife Audrey and their shared trauma over the disappearance of their daughter Joan (Maika Monroe) presumably to the world of hippie communes. The domestic sub-plot is conflated with the bombing campaign perpetrated by the Weather Underground. While all the background adds good context, it also serves to detract from Felt's role in one of the nation's greatest political dramas.

Liam Neeson is reliable if rather monotonal as an upstanding and upright FBI agent incredulous as the agency atrophies from the top. He defines the film's suitably nondescript shade, perhaps the best tribute to the man who managed to change history and remain totally invisible.

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Movie Review: Loving (2016)

A historical biography, Loving is the story of the romance that resulted in a legal challenge on laws banning mixed-race marriage in Southern states.

It's the late 1950s in rural Virginia. In a small but diverse Caroline County community, bricklayer and car mechanic Richard Loving, (Joel Edgerton), who is white, is very much in love with Mildred (Ruth Negga), a local black woman. After she announces her pregnancy they get married in Washington DC and start planning to build a house. It does not take long for local sheriff Brooks (Marton Csokas) and his men to burst in at midnight and arrest Richard and Mildred for violating Virginia's law banning interracial marriage.

Judge Bazile (David Jensen) suspends their one year prison sentence on condition they leave the state for 25 years. They relocate to Washington DC, where the family grows to three kids. But the lure of home is strong and with the civil rights movement gaining momentum, Mildred writes to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, seeking his intervention. The case is referred to the American Civil Liberties Union, and lawyer Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) is appointed to investigate appeal options.

A story of a humble and simple couple who became the catalysts for historic change, Loving is as low key and understated as its reluctant protagonists. Director Jeff Nichols also wrote the script, and he adopts a suitably detached observer tone, avoiding any hint of speeches, moralizing or even condemnation. Nichols also resists the temptation to enter the courtroom for any longer than needed. Once their case makes it to Supreme Court Richard and Mildred decide to stay away, and Nichols respects their decision and avoids turning Loving into a courtroom drama.

The story only gains strengths from it rejection of grandstanding and labels of heroism or villainy. Richard is a lumbering man of few words, his brooding exterior hiding a sensitive soul deeply dedicated to Mildred. In a memorably minimalist performance Joel Edgerton often occupies the screen with awkward silence and uncomfortable shuffling.

Ruth Negga compensates with a soft smile, a home-grown glint in her eye and a more patient stance. Mildred is devoted to her roots, her community and her new husband and growing family. Always a misfit in urban Washington DC, it is Mildred who takes the initiative to write to Kennedy, and then agitates Richard into accepting meetings with the ACLU. She is also marginally more comfortable with the media and engages with the press to shine a light on their case. Michael Shannon has a one-scene appearance as a Life magazine photographer.

Loving finds tender beauty in the elegance of rural life, Richard and Mildred the products of a tight-knit community that has largely embraced diversity and moved past labels based on skin colour. As is often the case, seminal change traces back to the most humble of origins.

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Movie Review: The Equalizer (2014)

A polished action thriller, The Equalizer offers plenty of style and an immersive Denzel Washington performance, but also a limited premise stretched over an unnecessarily long running time.

In Boston, former CIA operative Bob McCall (Denzel Washington) lives a lonely quiet life, works at a home improvement store, and still grieves the loss of his wife. Most nights he is unable to sleep and whiles away the hours at a 24/7 diner, where young prostitute Alina (Chloë Grace Moretz) is also a regular. Bob and Alina strike up conversations and become friends of sorts. When Alina gets badly roughed up by her Russian mobster pimp, Bob hunts down the den of gangsters and kills five bad guys in 28 seconds.

Unfortunately, the dead Russians are part of a much larger criminal cartel controlled by the Moscow-based Pushkin (Vladimir Kulich) and involved in bribery, corruption and extortion on a national scale. Pushkin dispatches his top henchman Nicolai (Marton Csokas) to find out who killed his men. Nicolai teams up with corrupt police officer Frank Masters (David Harbour), and they start to hunt down McCall to seek revenge.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua and based on the 1980s television series, The Equalizer oozes with  elegance. While the story is standard fare involving hissing Russian villains and an incredulously indestructible hero, Fuqua's weapon is Denzel Washington in fine form. Together director and star create enough depth in the central character to elevate the film above the merely ordinary.

McCall suffers from a combination of obsessive compulsive disorder, insomnia, and leftover depression from his wife's death. These ailments are hinted at on the margins of the film, creating enough of a tantalizing taste that this is a person with a rich emotional history worth spending time with, despite his loner tendencies.

Fuqua's best and worst attributes are revealed in the two highlight action scenes. McCall's cool invasion of the gang hangout to eliminate the scum responsible for Alina's agony is a masterpiece of build-up and execution. But later McCall has to deal with a dozen or so heavily armed goons in a home improvement warehouse store. That scene is both prolonged to the point of exhaustion and starts to resemble a slasher film parody, with McCall taking down his enemies one by one with an assortment of power tools rigged into weapons of death.

Marton Csokas provides a sturdy enough counterpoint to Washington, but Chloë Grace Moretz is shortchanged as she disappears from the film for a very long time. Melissa Leo and Bill Pullman appear in one scene as McCall's former colleagues from his prior life with the CIA.

The Equalizer is effective in what it does, but it does relatively little and for too long.

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